


A Bird Through The Night

by itsnotasecret



Category: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson - Fandom, One Direction (Band)
Genre: (Also there will be smut and beyond), (Kaveshi is not as horrible as Louis will have you believe, But the scenes and the feeling that I'm hopelessly trying to convey, Christmas, I reckon you give it a go), It's not truly about the details and the characters kind of, M/M, New Years, Ok bye, This is a story I haven't been able to stop writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-05-21 01:31:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 43,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6033186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsnotasecret/pseuds/itsnotasecret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis takes a lot of walks after dark. Harry drinks a lot of whiskey. It's December in London and the end of the world.</p><p>Or: Bleak and tedious tale of winter and darkness and hesitant love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. To Your Wild (And Sometimes The Universe)

  
 

_It’s the moments your thoughts are wrapped in happy things and your eyes crinkle with crow’s feet, cheeks copper, that I wait for you to burst._

_I’ve been warned that I can die of no sleep, wither without dreams …_

_yet there you are erupting, and I can’t close my eyes._

 

* * *

 

Louis sat on a wood-cracked stool with his window ajar, sniffing minus eight degrees Celsius and gasoline exhaust of the neighbour’s Volvo idling by snow-heavy hedges. Mr. Poulsen was in the front, yelling for his misses and their twin boys to get the hell in.

 

Sensing it would be wise to cache it for later use, Louis’d spared Chivas Regal from the year before. Tipping his head, he caught nine stars watching from above in even colder places, colder atmospheres.

Christmas was not an easy time for Louis. Between throws of swearwords and the occasional brussels sprout, he spent lone moments in a pallid blue bedroom reminding more of a cramped garret than a place for quiet wanks and a spider-free night’s sleep. Though minus the spider vacancy, it fit the criterion of a garret just perfectly.

The neon fairy lights of Poulsons' house and garage flashed blue, green and red intermittently. Annoyingly. He shut the window. It quivered the fire of a tealight, flickering through the print of an everose stag. In its miniscule world, it was probably the size of a gale. Louis graced the cylinder glass with the top joints of his fingers, caressing it.

He was to write a full-length novel and become seriously wealthy from a record-breaking sale from the first few months of release. Yet there he'd sat all evening, eyes darting and re-darting at shorter cut-outs from brewing tales, asterisks parting the sequences to help him keep track of a total 19 elaborate brainstorms.

He wished it would be more of them. It made no sense that there weren't _more_ of them.

He shifted his gaze back at the stars.

A tear yanked loose.

With no key for his door, any sobs would have to be quiet. He picked up on giggles and girls galloping up and down the staircase but he’d easily catch on if his sisters ran across the dimmed hallway over to his room. Have time to wipe the tears away, turn up a cover Liza Owen did of Chandelier and bark that he was busy. They’d think it was just another day. Nothing noteworthy different. Melodramatic him.

It wasn’t so much the seething anger that urged him upstairs and away from his parents; it was their resentment from going through with an actual divorce, determined to lead the kids out into a safe and happy life where they’d be the only ones for miles around to have parents still married, and therefore become more stable and sagacious beings. Loving.

It was counterintuitive how his mum would note with snarky remarks how the bathroom lights were waning and should be fixed immediately and why hadn’t it already? His father shamelessly proceeding with offensive name-callings, but never out loud and never face to face. Maybe neither of them meant to be heard by the other, and in that awkward dance they ended up accentuating everything they despised. A forever spotlighted focal point, shining bright for 25 years.

But it was fine because Louis had a way out.

Yes.

He was in mid-twenties and most certainly had a way out. Sure, the job market had been tougher than expected. And he’d been feeling a bit chapfallen the past year, struggling to perform the simplest of barista tasks (café jobs he took in between waiting for his authorship to start) and sure, that had stripped him off all his savings, and sure, he was in beyond desperate need of a job.

There were few available though, up there in northern No Where where the frost stayed put nine months in, where former classmates had never gotten out to see the world but skipped straight to the part where they inherited their parents’ estate (or a propitious spot of land right next to them) along a down payment of next to nothing. And babies. Neighbour and former classmate Freddy had brought his kid over once, and though having her squeal with laughter, she'd also vomited a remarkable amount of porridge over Louis’ tank top.

Freddy merely served as a reminder of the time in Louis’ life when he was accredited the Grey Mouse. He’d stay in the background only to protrude every now and then to pinch his female classmates’ bums (for fun; he was depressed), but the whole concept of a grey mouse was still a blow. Exactly how had he been boring? Why hadn’t the girls liked him? Why did they not only seemed bothered, but a fair bit queasy, too? His wandering presence a living repellent … Sad times, indeed. Times supposedly over.

The trek was long and heavy from these series of events to his soon to be mansion in Hampstead Garden suburbs. In someone else’s eyes, that stretch of imagination might even seem just that – imaginary.

He refocused on the brick-walled houses tossed around squares and lanes down below.

A firework blew nearby. Odd with fireworks on Christmas Eve.

Downing the dregs of the Scottish goop, he shut off BBC 4 and got to his feet. Enough with the chandelier swings, he declared silently  to the Animal Rescue calendar. Lurching downstairs, he jammed into his leather snow boots, heaved on a jacket and picked the fluffiest set of earmuffs off the monks bench.

No one heard him leave.

In the loiter down the housing estates’ main road, his intertwisted thoughts shook loose. Agile snowflakes came to pepper his hair almost with a warmth, though accompanied with unforgiving wind scything through the nylon layers.

Louis treasured walking. Once he got going he could stroll for hours. Night time was the best time as it offered a versatile stage of any other road in the world with little to no imaginative effort. A Danish countryside, a Balinese suburb. Some dodgy outskirt of Detroit.

He sniffed the air squirrel-style and flicked on his heel spontaneously for a brief return to the mud room and the car keys to his dad’s Chevy Sonic – he was occasionally granted its aid – before hopping in it to blast the heating on full. 

 

By a 12 minute drive, he’d arrived at the pond. Ominous _tick-tick-ti...-cackrrrrrrr_ 's cranked from the hood as he flicked out the key, the silence leaving nought but the cogwheeled grind of snow beneath his feet, tracing his foray towards the familiar mansions and lampposts. They hid behind a wisping snowfall, halo like a silent film.

The pub down the corner, with its white and brambly cemented walls, was of a 1600th century construction. Snakeskin handbags and Range Rovers dominated the premises, a paradoxical statement to the war-laden history of the place. (Louis had a somewhat over the top, protective streak for times long gone, this peculiar notion of it being part of him.)

Ahead of him lay footsteps tattooed on sheets of fluffy white. _Maybe a giant came in advance of me_ , he chuckled tacitly, eyes fixated on the tapered prints.

They vanished in the streetlight's intervalling dips, swallowed by utter darkness. It brought to mind the callow, yet poetic assumption of stars shining down on earth. Remnants of dead, fiery giga-rocks stemming from millions of years ago is what they were, their tint a belated reflection of something dead. When would people understand. God’s sake.

“Mhm, I’ll consider it,” he’d muttered at his mother’s suggestion (“Nikon D5200 with an autofocus system, two lenses, HD-video too, only £346 ‘til next Sat, Lou.”) He’d successfully avoided overspending, telling himself he’s got no money, none for cinema, none for friends he didn’t want to hang with but had no valid excuse but money to dismiss, none for Christmas gifts, none for take-out.

But he had known in his room this very evening. Staring dead at a sky it had occurred to him with the whip of divine insight: there was nothing left to document.

“Oh, that’s great, love. We know how much you love photography.” Her fingers'd left a final clamp linger atop the fabric of his shoulder, “you’re the creative one of the family.”

It didn’t seem to matter what made up a dysfunctional household as long as each kid got their token for the day, the backbone, to face the world outside the walls.

He had faced it though, gotten slightly injured by it even, by what he’d seen in the world, and worse, _felt_.

No, the world wasn’t for him.

Some things didn’t get easier with time.

Some things stayed.

 

*

  
(December 26th, 14 days to go.)

Harry Styles tied the shoelaces of his purple Puma sneakers, an embarrassing gift from his sister Gemma - though he had secretly wanted pink – and chucked his keys and iPod in the discreetly placed pocket of his sweatshirt (alpaca wool in the stitches; he could sprint in the cold for hours).

The air was crisp, the sky jet-black and the smell _perfection_ , honeyed almost. He set off in light jog back and forth his lane. Well. Not his lane per see, but the lane was in front of the street’s only house, which was his, so.

It was on the third loop he spotted something small and silvery peak up. Shame losing that in the holidays, he mulled, picking up the orphaned iPhone. The chilled screen lit up. Its backdrop unravelled with lag, as if molasses arranged beneath the buttons.

The air stung straight through to his solar plexus, which most definitely was a presage; he now had a strangers phone to take care of and protect. Meaning he should head back sooner than later. And maybe soak in a lengthy and hot shower. It wasn’t that the alpaca hadn’t done its purpose or that a phone spiked more attention than a healthy fitness regime ... Or that it was the first time he’d felt this … this sought-after _zest_ after a dark December, and November. October. September before that.

Because no. It truly was cold. January to come. Then February. March. April. May after that.

He went up his gatepost, dialled the six-digit code and gazed inanimate at the iron bars screeching left. After the stride to the main door, he stooped to a sudden halt inside.

His eyes screwed spellbound on the mirror above the entryway table, on the boy with small shoulders, slender frame. People were always surprised to see him in real life when compared to the buff-ish man in the photos. He was never sure whether to apologize or concur.

He placed the iPhone on the table and turned for the kitchen, willing his ribs to relax. Turning on the tap, he fetched a chipped Morgan Kane mug in wait for the cold to run hot. The cupboard filled to the gills with blacks of Earl Grey and Darjeeling, and he motioned his arm tentatively to reach.

_In. Out. Easy. It's easy.  
_

He closed its door, Darjeeling filter paper swivelled off to somewhere on the slate tiles in his rip and tear.

*

“So this person,” Nick wiped grease off his chin with a tautly folded, off-white napkin. It’d been two hours since the brew and Harry was nearing starvation. It stung of strange relief. “Just accidentally dropped his phone right outside your house? On the dodgy lane in front of the three story dig you have by yourself? Where no one ever goes? Where old women speed past terrified of head-on collisions with banshees?”

“How could you crash into a ghost, though?” Billie placed a napkin across her shimmering pair of black nylons, knife and fork ready for feast.

Harry watched them eat. “It’s not gloomy, just dimly lit. With not many people.”

“Have you read any messages? Are there dirty photos?”

“I haven’t.” He quaffed down his Camden brewed beer. _Liquids first._ It tasted like lukewarm urine. “Think it’s a girl’s though. The background pic is a half-naked David Beckham.”

“Didn’t know he could fit in there?” Nick winked.

“He’s hot.” Billie nodded sagely as she wolfed down her flat oyster mushrooms and Stilton cream, ignoring Nick's sorry attempt at dry punch lines.

Harry’s stare averted out the window, his unconcern for the world disturbed only by some American music – Green Day? – and whiffs of frost and cashmere for each time the door sprang up. Why had they chosen that table?

He watched the tapers totter; their light waver, restrain, waver, restrain … like a portend of dark times ahead. Or maybe he was just being wishful, hand clutched around his life vest of a beer. Empty. He should take another one. Guzzle it down. He should see the candles for the compartmentalized fragments of atoms they were. How nothing had sense. He irked. There'd been something very messy and nettled about this day.

 

There had eventually come extra beer. Several, actually, and a few hours later his mind was filled with dancing churns of crud snow, Billie’s lips, Nicks suggestions. Eyebrows dark as the night.

And with the window wide open, he fell asleep beneath covers. No sheets. Four pillows.

The kitchen radio had buzzed. It was the song he’d grown so tired of.

" _… Tomorrow doesn’t exist … like it doesn’t exist … I’m gonna fly … a bird through the sky … my tears as they dry …_ "

The only thing he recalled that next morning, dabbing sleep off his face, was the last snowflake.

It had swivelled down in front of his face, barely brushing his nose. It was with his head peeking out his bedroom window, closing his eyes. He'd shrugged his mane backwards, trying to reach that algid feeling. It'd gotten him a bit queasy, as if the seasickness from childhood returned there on the third floor, feet horizontal and no waves in sight. His eyes focused on the pines across the street when a white vision disturbed the jade hodgepodge, and that was it.

The last snowflake.

*

There was a delay on the Jubilee line the next day and Harry threw in the towel at Swizz Cottage. The walk to his home was 40 minutes, give or take. No problem.

A whole set of plans and strategies was set out for 2016, all in the past hour. Come March, Harry’d date a total of four women at once; two supermodels and two randoms. The randoms were the safest choice, said Helen, the media marketer, because it portrayed something authentic and honest and likely. Few ever believed dating supermodels was a heartfelt search for permanent girlfriends anyway. Harry didn’t understand how dating randoms could be either, but fair enough.

Problem with randoms was their unprofessional manner of not always sticking with the script. It was more the rush of fake-dating a superstar that served as the main attraction, not the possibility of being hired sometime in the future for more assignments. So often they told their friends and blew the whole cover. If only they had a clue, they could make millions. Pursue modelling just because.

The air swarmed with light drizzle as he exited the open-ceilinged staircase of the underground. His forgotten iPod lay smug atop the canister in the hallway, and seeing how his own personal thoughts could only be compelling for so long, his fingers set off to physically itch. Brought to his awareness, he took notice of how scrawny they were. Especially compared to ... Last time he looked? Creepily gaunt, some might say. Nick suggested it be a party trick. Harry didn’t know for what exactly, though he liked how they looked. Grey and spindly in a late December tinge. Like his soul ... Though that was probably too dour of a thought. He couldn't think of a single person in his circle of friends who wouldn't rant about his funereal observations of life.

He huffed.

He really shouldn’t … It was someone else’s. A woman’s or a girl’s.

Maybe they had some hot friends he could just give a peek at, though.

Alright.

Alright …

He whipped out the anonymous phone he'd kept with him for whatever reason. Boredom seemed the most logical.

There was no passcode, perhaps by choice or by some frosty act of the glaze it had laid in. He’d check her music - innocent bogus alike.

The background photo switched from Beckham to a colourful rooster. Cornflakes?

Dispassionately curious, he moseyed off on an album search. A folder named _hjrb_ displayed a set of four photos, with a nameless one next to it refusing to unlock. He ventured through the first.

Two boys, a very blonde and a darker blonde, at a party, it looked like. They pouted.

Two angry car horns stirred Harry to the realisation he'd jaywalked. He skirted across the road with an itchy sort of agitation. Because he hadn’t seemed kind, Harry decided. The boy on the right. He saw it in the eyes. Careless and corrupt. Immoral at best. But careless, definitely careless. Why would the girl who owned the phone want a boyfriend like that?

The second and third photo were of brick walls, one with glass blocks and the other with bay windows. Maybe her boyfriend was an architect or property manager, forcing her to store property developments on her phone. The fit was too easy; that sly face atop a slick suit, filed forms in a satchel, rock solid handshakes. He portrayed it vivid and alive in second sight as he stirred from yet a honk. The Tinseltown emblem flashed in the centre of his vision from where he verged the main road. Was he here already? Mere ten minutes to go.

He shoved, definitely didn’t slide, the phone down the pocket of his hermetic jeans and postponed the last folder until he was in bed, hair rattled wet from a shower and briefs cupping his crotch; the phone just a little bit warmer and fully functioning now. From downstairs, the kitchen radio played tacky Christmas songs ("… _To rock the night away_ ") and he suffered through them with half a glass of red wine. German.

Shit! What? …

He gawked.

_What?_

A boy lay in front of his face, suggestive with tummy on a maroon bedspread and feet entwined in the air. His bum peaked like a miniature valley; implications of muscles flexed his upper arms. Naked.

Something about his smile seemed covert, reminding Harry of those incomplete sketches his mate Jonah had produced at Goldsmith's Department of Art. Like it hadn’t come in fruition yet.

“Babe?” The sheets pulled. Her hand searched for his in tired attempt and stroked the first thing it reached – the heel of his palm. “How did the meeting go?”

He trembled a bit deciding to view the second and final photo. The same boy (he double checked the nude one, yep, same boy) was now clad in tracksuit bottoms tucked up to his knees, a coal-black tank top and red snapback. He was holding a baby while sitting cross-legged on the floor.

“Fine.” He placed the phone on the bedside. “Did I wake you?”

It sounded angry, part of the agitation beforehand still in him. He was in choler due to god knows what all of the time, and it seemed like anything would trigger it these days. Besides, why did people have nude photos on display for the world, for Harry, to see? Just … why?

“No,” she yawned.

He curved around her in a big spoon with chin rested to her hair. “Night, C.”

“Mm …” she sighed, mind in a dream he didn’t know.

  
*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was originally inspired by a cover of Sia's Chandelier for this story. Hence 'A Bird Through The Night' which is part of its lyrics.
> 
> The bird drawing is Vincent Van Gogh's Swift.
> 
> May I just say I did not intend for Louis' friend to be named Freddy and in addition to that, for Freddy to be a dad. This was written before babygate. 
> 
> I’m writing this for my own enjoyment, there’s not much action going on really. In the name of pastimes, let's call this a time consuming, rookie sort of project.


	2. Copper Kettles

(December 28th, 12 days to go.)

His teeth chattered at the illusive snow falling down. The only reason for which he could tell its existence were the lithe beads of melted crystals dripping rhytmically down his ringlets into his collar.

Coldest day of the year, the radio'd announced. Coldest day and the bird was fifteen bloody minutes late.

He’d texted a number which had appeared frequently on the phone, somebody named Niall, and Niall had let the owner of the phone know, and now Harry and the owner were meeting up at his, or not his, lane, where black ice currently seethed up to paralyze his toes.

It was a fragile thing, Harry and the winter. So beautiful but oh, so deadly. Fuck if he’d freeze his balls off for a person into brick walls and cornflakes.

A figure emerged through the dark, down the lane. Petite. And no one else around. Surely, this was the owner.

Oh, it was a boy. God. How long did he have to wait?

To Harry's surprise, the person halted within the bound of the streetlight, sporting stubs and a too large grey bobble hat. Ugh, was this gonna be an autograph thing?

“Heya.” The person tucked his fists into the saggy pockets of a jeans jacket.

“Hey.” _I really do apologize but I can’t move my fingers, see? Frostbite. Sorry. Yes,_ Harry reasoned, _that’ll do_.

“So, uh … You got my phone?”

Wha …

“Yes,” he replied courteously, mental imagery fused with the androgynous models at Cara’s last gig. This could be one of those very boyish girls, with the hair tucked in a bun up the hat. The lips did seem glossy, but then again … the stubs. A breath of relief escaped the lips as his eyes peered down Harry’s pockets. _Not the eyes of a woman._ “Oh, that’s good, I’m glad.”

Harry stared, frozen. He was frozen. The winter had finally gotten to him and now he was dying. Nope, another hyperbole. Warmth pinched his chest, he could feel it. His wrists. “Here.” He flipped it out from his pocket. “‘s working normally.”

The boy took it in a gentle advance. “Thanks. Typical me … Driving miles from home and going on a five minute walk only to lose my phone in the snow. I even had it zipped up in my pocket, I’ve no idea how it got away from me." His sentences were rushed. Or maybe he just spoke that way.

“It happens. Basically everyone I know has dropped their phone on the ground and the screen’s broken.”

“Yeah? Guess I was lucky. Mine’s all perfect I see.”

Harry watched snow assign his shoulders. A marihuana leaf graced the right chest pocket. Might as well. “I … I live right here,” he gestured at the cemented building to their left. “If you’d like a cup of tea or something.”

“Tea?” The boy’s eyes darted about, like he had trouble making out the only house on the lane. He clenched his biceps in an attempt to calm a wave of shivers.

“I’ve got all sorts. Earl Grey, Chamomile, Pukka, Liquorish, Lemon …”

“Oh, well, I’d love some tea. Thank you.” He heaved a deep breath while on his tiptoes, as if to detract the smell of tea from the air, “Some Pukka would be good, it’s so strong.”

His chest appeared to balloon for each intake, though all in all narrow; his collarbones protruded brittle and ash in the shadows of his scarf. It most definitely was the boy from the photos.

“I’ve got milk, too, so. Goes well with strong.”

“’s the perfect blend, innit?”

“Yeah.” It felt like that was the only word left in Harry’s vocabulary at this time of night, in this ludicrous cold. A puff soared out his mouth, steaming at a pitch-black sky barren of stars. _Sad_. “OK. Let’s go.”

 

 

In the mudroom stood six lilac cylinder candles atop a scraggly, white shelf. Each jar overflowed with suspended condensations. Which could remind of other things, Louis thought, but didn’t mention of course.

“I’m into candles,” Harry explained, watching him sniff.

Shortly after, other sounds filtered through to replace their piecemeal conversation. The pour of water to a casserole, its clink when placed on the stove. Explosions of tiny bubbles at the surface as it heated. The mellow clank of a wooden spoon Harry fetched sugar with in a Lyle’s Black Treacle. A stack of emerald melamine plates lay next to the sink with a dark wooded Philco humming in the corner.

“Cool radio.”

“Tropic model from 1942. Got it off my granddad.”

“Retro.” Louis bucked up against the marbled kitchen island, unsure of where to look. And Harry wasn't speaking, ogling a poster of a pink octopus abreast the wall clock.

In passing, Louis speculated whether he’d gone through his photos. Maybe that’s why he was so blithe. He was probably itchy for Louis to leave already, regretted inviting him in; was only being courteous and karma-motivated. _Gosh, that cam timer pic of me in bed. Red blood velvet sheets. He must think I’m twinking for Russian oligarchs._

Harry appeared a head taller as Louis looked back at him, snagging two mugs from a top cabinet in restless motion.

They were white without any logo, any art, and Louis worried it’d slip off his fingers, who seemed to grow in tandem as well, before he placed them safely on the island. Pouring in water and assorting pyramid teas, Louis had impatience spread through him. He’d blister his tongue downing the hot water but it would be worth it. He wasn’t wanted. He could tell.

“So, merry Christmas I guess I should say.” Harry urged forth one of the mugs. They had prints on them after all. A hand atop a moon. _Odd._

He couldn’t help but chuckle as he accepted it; the most unwanted conversation in the history of his life. Excluding those with his estranged father, of course. Oh, this wonderful life. “Merry Christmas.”

“Do you, uh, live around here?”

“North of Finchley and then some. I just like this area. Nice to walk about here.”

“You’re a walker?”

“Yeah, yeah … I can walk for hours. Long as I got my music, though.”

“Same here. I’m more of a jogger but I love to be by myself outside, listening to music.”

“It’s therapeutic some say.”

Now it was Harry who laughed. Louis was going to go for a demure, _something wrong?_ but a bubble tingled his throat, and he giggled involuntarily. “My mate said you were funny by the way.”

“The person I’ve been texting?”

“Yeah. Niall.”

Harry couldn’t for the life of him remember he’d said something funny. It was, in fact, of 99.99% certainty he'd done no such thing. “He seems nice as well.”

“Oh, he’s the best, a great friend. A loyal, forever one, you know.”

Harry smiled. It was a quirk too shallow to convey sincere understanding.

“Well, great tea,” Louis heaved up the mug for salute, “but I guess it’s time for departure.”

The finder stared at him. The dip of his spine rested against the countertop. A pint-sized window encapsulated his hair. Harry was his name, Niall had said, and Harry had typed _x_ after every single reply. “That’s soon.” Not to mention how guttural his voice was. It hadn’t been only moments ago. Or had it been all along? Always? “You didn’t like the tea? I’ve got plenty more.”

 _No need to be fake_ , Louis miffed. “That’s fine, early day tomorrow.”

“Work?”

“Yeah, at a café. It’s my trial shift, so.”

“OK.”

“What do you do?”

“Me? I sing.”

“Ah. Hard getting gigs these days, or?’

“Not really.”

“Hm.”

They stared at each other.

“A café’s been calling you the past few days, actually. Is that the one?”

“Becks?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“I’ve never been.”

“’s cosy.” No need for elaborations. _Just get the hell out._

Harry smiled affably now. It was contradictive. “I’m sure.”

“Alright, well!”

“See you, then.”

Louis nearly tripped over a weave log basket filled to the brim of lopped Los Angeles Times newspapers, and exited the front door feeling airheaded. A cryptic sting dogged him back to his dad’s car, to the rotten house and his depressive room – that _see you_ had been the most mocking one he’d heard for his entire life.

Niall really had said he was clubby and easygoing. It bothered Louis for some reason, that he never reached out to people the same way other people had the hanker for. It bothered him that he couldn’t hold conversations, couldn’t even flirt.

It also bothered him that Hannah sat in his room watching his DVD’s. Her fingers always left a fat grease on the discs after an evening of the Tomlinsons' staple; chips cooked a la dente in their stainless steel deep fryer.

But most of all, how he’d gotten back his iPhone, available to all and no one.

 

*

 

(December 29th, eleven days to go.)

They sauntered Muswell Hill for a generous 30 minutes, most restaurants excluded due to Diane’s gluten intolerance. Or allergy. Harry asked her each time they met up but got scolded by Cas for it as soon as they stepped into their – his – house after an outing. “In-to-le- _rance_ ,” she nagged. (That, or all-er- _gey_.)

They stood shivering outside a neighbouring café to the restaurant they’d just considered and omitted. “Ah, blackberry brownies!”

“Yeah.” Diane offered the menu a quick glance. “Seems nice, actually.”

Harry’s toes were numb again. All everything felt like was white. Cold; a colour. Who knew. He felt like a puppy at a loss, miffed at the group's ability of concentration. His only remaining energy was spent on begging this place not to be pretentious. Or filled with anyone who'd recognize him.

 

“A double-date!” Cas had screeched earlier that evening. Harry’s palms had reached for his ears by instinct but halted midway. It would be rude. And consume time for explaining and apologizing; time crucial for his deciphering every sentence in _Missing Ship Found Sunken On Sandbank – Maersk Sealand Denies Awareness of Risky Waters_.

“Oh, Harry, you’ve only got those superficial ass-lickers around you every single day, and now there’s no tour. You’re allowed to relax! To be normal for once! Ed and Diane are so nice, it wouldn’t hurt one bit to hang out with sane people.”

It would’ve been even ruder to shut the door in her face, so Harry'd pressed his knuckles discreetly against his ears, fixating on the paper. “Yep. Sure.”

“Yes? I’ll call Diane right now. How about tonight?”

“Sure.”

“Mr. Chattyman,” she'd smiled and blown him a kiss from the door.

 

“How could I live without you when I’m feeling this way,” bellowed a woman’s voice through the speakers by the threshold. Harry assessed songs to pinpoint the character of any place, any person – but his knack stood useless here. It was all but lazing, it being his most innate, intuitive faculty.

Ornate tables scattered throughout, wooden and oval but differently sized. The walls bursted with hues of gold, brown and kelly green.

Monmouth coffee lined the counters, alongs loaves of pumpernickel- and yeasted bread, homemade pear juice and pate, fresh salads and ceramic bowls of fennel and poppy seeds. Posters of tea brands and articles from press plastered the mosaic tiles behind, the latter acclamations on café business and its jolly customers.

They chose a nook to the right of the entrance. Cas ushered herself and Harry to the seats below a shelf of parchment books and academic journals. He sighed at her eager approach to the psychology section, grabbing himself a laminated menu. No French snails or Norwegian moss. _Moss_ , he rolled his eyes. He’d had it at that award-winning place in Copenhagen. Here, thankfully, mozzarella cheese seemed as culinary abstruse they’d take it.

Food arrived shortly and Harry placed a whole tomato in his mouth (it wasn’t that big) to ease his way out the conversations. Watching a huge chandelier reflect in the glass doors and the floor-to-ceiling windows as he chewed, a stark blue sky came cutting through it all. December 29th …

" _I’m so happy that I found you, I love you more every day …_ "

It caught in his throat.

“Harry? Harry, honey?” Cas slapped the expanse between his shoulder blades. “I’ve told you not to eat fruits whole. Last summer, he ate a whole banana,” she glanced apologetically over to Diane and Ed as if those two incidents were inextricably linked, “I looked away for one second and next thing I knew, the whole thing was in his mouth!”

Ed shrieked at this. Inappropriately so.

“’m fine,” Harry coughed, a firing red flitting cross his cheeks.

He searched for him.

He was clearing the table on the other side of the room from of a pair of middle-aged women who’d just left.

“Honey?”

Becks. Had he’d known they’d gone to Becks? “Yeah?”

“You don’t have to finish the rest, you know. Here, take some of my water. Guzzle it all down.”

He shared a private eye roll with Ed. Thank the angels for Ed. He’d been lucky enough having him at 17, and now they were 26 and 23, still lucky. After warming up for Ed for two years, Harry’d finally gotten a break with Syco, now emerging in the global market continent by continent, splicing up in the same league.

He inched towards Harry. A sly look laced his eyes, and Harry didn’t trust it. Not one bit. “Spotted someone?”

“No?”

Though someone, on the other hand, had definitely spotted him.

The boy who didn’t like tea stared at Harry.

With just the blink of an eye he fretted on, flush and tense, lighting beeswax candles who Harry only then realised were everywhere. Literally. Five were standing by the entrance they’d gone in mere minutes ago. Three toasted right in front of him. Had he really been freezing just before?

“Honey, sweetheart.” Her hand splayed over his. “Is everything alright?”

She was so annoyingly caring. Could it even be termed caring? He winced and stood up. “Thirsty. I'll just ... ’m getting a beer.”

 

It was a slow queue, though, and standing there by himself observing everyone else, a million thoughts bombarded him at once. He hated when this happened.

If a person doesn’t care at all, he asked himself factually, but still have to socialize with other people, how can that person know whether he’s chosen the right people? How can he know anything if he doesn’t feel a right or wrong to begin with? What if a right life was a wrong life, but he wasn’t aware of it because he’s just standing there and existing?

He tried to keep it objective and philosophical. In the more graphic days of his mind, at 12 years old, he’d distinctly seen a black dot grow from his thighs up his stomach and chest and spread like a cancer to the immediate field around him. And that had led to all sorts of weird and angsty thoughts.

It was a notion of being isolated, set apart, and he knew that no one would understand if he explained. How could they if he didn’t understand it himself?

He hummed mindlessly along the new song playing… " _The look of a king in his eyes_ " … Separation from others was a key way of understanding this, his therapist had said. Because when not belonging to anyone or any place, the mind sometimes gets so lost that it starts to annihilate things. Small things and crucial things, ranging from empathy for those on the breaking news, to things like interpersonal love and passion. “The want to live, and fear of dying,” she’d said. That’s what went away. And Harry was at that stage. Strangely, what stuck with him the most, was the image of the pen she clenched at the corner of her mouth. A Montblanc … Hand waving in front of oval brows and flyaway hair. Teetering lips holding back a giggle. No snowflakes this time … _Oh_! “Hi!”

“Hello,” Louis smiled. It was teetering. Definitely containing several giggles.

“Uhm …” Why was he here? Why had he gotten up? _Liquids first._ Beer. Yes. “I came to get a beer.”

“You sure it wasn’t a shot?”

“Hm?”

He chuckled. “Nothing.”

“No, I … shots? No.” Harry eyed the fridge up and down. Whatever he meant by that. “I’ll have the a … the Santa’s Elf Christmas Brew. From Doncaster.”

“My, my,” he placed his palms on the counter, “that’s an excellent choice.”

Was the boy who didn’t like tea, taking the piss? He loitered in response to Harry’s somewhat aghast expression. “’m from Doncaster myself, originally. Ran by a family friend, that brand. Very good.”

“As good as tea?”

“Yeah, yeah! In different ways though, of course. Or … what do you mean?” He perched at Harry’s look.

“ _Nothing_.”

Louis full on guffawed. It caught Harry by such surprise that he frenzied in pretending it hadn’t. “Proper jokester, are you? Don’t think I like tea?”

“Maybe you like it one sip a day.”

“It was too hot.”

“It’s common to let it cool first. Like,” Harry picked at an abandoned menu by the till. “… How you didn’t get scorched from that, I don’t know.”

“I did,” Louis poked his tongue out but Harry saw no blisters, “thank you very much!”

“You could’ve just stayed.” Harry zipped his lips so not to grin again. Once a day was too many already. He mustn’t get fooled by life’s emotions.

Louis popped the cap of the cold beer. “Too much chatter, mate. Needed the peace and quiet after that.”

“Hah … and you? Not one word ‘til the water boiled.”

“ _See ya_ ,” Louis mimicked, waving his hand in a dismissive motion.

Was this a contest? Because Harry won contests. “And who didn’t even undress, may I ask?”

A poke.

Harry panicked. Was it the black dot this time? It had felt physical too, he dwelled. Like a miniature stab. “Sorry,” a man peeked in to his field of vision, looking genuinely apologetic, “I just … I was just waiting for my coffee …”

“Shitfuck!” Louis spun around. Several droplets glided down the mug as he handed over a freshly poured cuppa. “So sorry, Arthur. Free refills!”

He was eyed a more dubious look. “Right you are, Tomlinson, as it’s been for 14 years.”

“Ex-actly!” He swung his index finger in assent. Soon as he left, Louis brushed make-belief sweat of his forehead with the back of his hand. “Regulars,” he huffed.

“Hey, don’t mock the regulars. I’ll might become one myself.”

“Be my guest. Literally.” He laughed and flung his arms wide open. _Expressive personality traits_ , Harry summoned.

“I will.”

It was decided. A decision made.

“Alright, cool.” His weight shifted from hip to hip, eyes darting to and fro the cash register. _Very expressive_. “Enjoy your beer, then.” Then he flapped out a cloth from his back pocket and set out to wipe the intricate fine points of the brass coffee machine.

 

“Who was that? Your friend? Do I know him?” Cas probed immediately on his return.

“Just someone I know.”

“He seems very nice! How long you’ve known him?”

“Not long.” OK, was this how Louis had felt that time? Harry being phony? Phonily polite? He hoped not. How could she possibly know he was nice? How could she genuinely care about that encounter? “He’s new in town,” he added to back the slightly bewildered stares off.

“New? He probably doesn’t know many here then?” Ed inquired.

“Probably not.”

“We should invite him for New Years!” Cas cheered. To Harry’s unexplainable chagrin, Ed and Diane’s heads nodded in unison. “It’s kind of for everyone, anyway,” Diane adduced, “might as well welcome new friends who aren’t that known in the area yet. We’ll introduce him to everyone so he can network. Go tell him it’s by Camden.”

“Sounds like the right thing to do.”

“He’ll might not wan-“

“Go ask,” Ed suggested. Simpered. Split his face in a horizontal half with a grin, even.

“He’s working.”

“Well, text him, then. You know what? Never mind,” he rose. Harry’s heart beat sharply at the motion. “I’ll ask him.”

“What? Now?”

But Ed was long gone already, elbows leaning in on the counter. Harry recoiled. “What’s the big deal, baby?” Cas tucked him in the nook of her elbow and twirled a finger round his flocks.

“I don’t know him that well. Bit odd just asking him out for New Years.”

“Well, it’s for plenty of people from all fields, the arts, the media, all sorts. Sasa Sestic, the Australian winner of the World Barista Championship this year, will join, though probably after the pub crawl. For all you know, Louis’ aspiring to become a professional barista?”

Harry craned to view Arthur make facial expressions of disgust midway his brew.

“Said he’d think about it.” Ed’s hands pressed sturdy circles on Harry's left shoulder. Though not seeing his face, Harry felt the too-known, cheeky smile transfer through his hands onto his nerves. Ed squeezed. “Wanted you to text him, though. For address.”

“Yeah,” he replied grumpily. "I will."

 

As they left later on, Harry was the last out the door. He decided to check on Louis in case he was cringing, too. A set of eyes glinted from beneath the chandelier. He was setting a table. There wasn’t a giggle this time. It looked more like a question, or a wonder. Or nothing. _Bye_ , Harry mouthed. Louis averted his eyes again but there was a smile. _There definitely was_ , Harry assured, as if his vision had spontaneously impaired and clamoured for second opinion.

A flock of newcomers cramped through the door, the cobber door-chime jingling behind him as he sped up towards the others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song at Beck’s is by Lisa Nilsson – How could I live without you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG8kBru_J_0. It offers that annoying kind of feel for those moody and fed up like Bird-Harry.
> 
> The Moon & Hand teacup is a real thing http://millaboutique.no/shop/merker/kuhn-keramics/moon-hand-tea-cup/


	3. In Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> on Venus it snows metal and rains sulphuric acid

  

 

“Louis, love, couldn’t you give it up for just this once?”

“I’ve got plans. Can’t she take the bus?”

“She’s an adult, love. We’re going to treat her like one. You’re going with Niall, aren’t you? Can’t he pick you up?”

“You know he lost his driver’s licence?”

“Think the Irish in him should’ve controlled itself bit more there, yeah,” Jo's lips tensed in a thin line, “but either way, that’s none of ours fault. Lottie will have the car for New Years. All the way down in Elephant & Castle, she’s going.”

“Elephant & … ?” He could rip his hair out, roots decatenated. “Do you hear yourself? Like, of course it’s not our fault Ni lost his licence, why the fu-”

“No swearing in this house, Lou.”

“Why not treat me as an adult? Why Lottie? Why not me?”

“You’re the oldest, L. You could’ve had your own car for instance.”

“I’ve only now gotten a job and it’s not even fulltime! How could I afford a car?”

Fuck this. He was 25.

_Fuck, fuck, fuck._

“Again, love, that’s not our problem. You’re an adult, too.”

“Well, I’m having it tonight.” He fumed down the stairs and snagged the car keys off the holed basket, the thin walls jittering a thunder in his wake as he whacked the door shut. The last glimpse his eyes caught was his father raising off his chair behind the conifer, though no worries; he could still hear each word on his mind spilling out across the front yard.

Louis offered a vague wonder of how dreary an image it would be if this was the last time he saw his dad. Balks and uproar. Louis taking off in cars he doesn’t own. Louis leaving. Louis’ not knowing where.

He ignited the red wreck, keeping the tears pooling his eye sacks at bay because embarrassingly, he never managed to get angry without crying.

It wasn’t even a big deal, having the car.

It was just that he was promised to use it for New Year’s. That it was freedom to him, and a break from home. It had nothing to do with sadness.

 _People cry for less_ , he averred as he shifted into fourth and scurried down and around the corners.

 

In the dark, everything had a feeling of being his property - the whole slot of trees and manors and lone hiking trails merged into one large expanse of clear air and solitude. Though the moments he usually spent lingering in the car once he’d parked due to the warmth it huddled during the drive, daydreaming of bestsellers and pies in the skies, wasn’t quite there tonight.

A new vibration had hold of him, his rib cage and tummy wrenching in each their turn.

_Out, out, out._

But breathing was hard once outside as well.

The fucking winter that never fucking ended.

_Jog._

He was going to jog. And vent. And faint from chilled skin and an overtaxed heart, beating too fervid for anyone’s good.

The lane lay placid and off-white as he strode his first steps onto it.

Louis used to imagine that snow had the sound of air guitars, each roaring riff swivelling down in enchanting, crystallized softness. Now the riffs were more like delicate piano, as if not even the sky could be bothered anymore.

There must be more, he willed, _more_ to life. The stars were numerous, and maybe if he stared long enough, telepathic answers would be sent and a universal power would ignite in him. He would win a million quid from a lottery participation he hadn’t been aware of entering. He’d go to Hong Kong. Or inner City, just down the block.

 _You’re not real, though_ … his eyes stung looking up at them. The snow with its piano tangents toppling him like tar. It wasn’t poetic. Not pretty one bit.

_Long gone, too late._

 

He stopped dead in his tracks.

 

A short-winded heaving sounded from somewhere close. It didn’t sound like that of an animal. A person? But there was no one in front or behind, nor as far as the street lights went.

A wind of sharp motion crossed him, and he found himself crashed up against something very … solid. Pulsing shock flew up his back, and the betraying snow came plastering his bum.

He waggled like pudding in the force of two sinewy arms heaving him up. Dim waves of _huh-huh-huh_ filled his ears.

“You OK?”

“Harry?” They gazed at each other. Because was it Harry? The person’s features blended with the dark of the night. The streetlights didn’t cast on him at all despite one being just a meter away.

“Louis? What are you doing here?”

Louis caught his breath in a tremble. He was an icebound puddle people should know better than to tread on, god’s sake. “Told you, I like walks.”

“Are you OK? Did I scare you?”

“Tall, dark man ambushing out the woods? Barely.”

Harry coughed, catching his own breath. Perhaps he’d been scared too. Though it didn’t look like it … His eyes looked glazed of algor and his mouth was lax, as if it was the 100th time this sort of encounter happened that day. “So sorry. Was jogging in the woods.”

“In the dark?”

“There’s no one there then.”

“But monsters?”

“And men.”

Louis forced a facial expression of _hah! band anecdote_ , but it sat congealed in his benumbed jaw.

“What are you doing here at this hour?”

“Tired of the family,” Louis shrugged. It probably looked like a seizure; coldest December day since 1997 according to the Met Office he’d read as the top story that morning sipping Beanies instant coffee. Godawful brew. Cheap though. Lasted well into midday when he went to take the garbage out and lost his zest for life somewhere on the way back.

“Oh. Right.” _Huh-huh-huh._ “We’ve all been there.”

A knackered mood washed over Louis. Even in his own escapade, he still had to flee. Where was left for him to be alone? Were things even happening? And why? Why were things happening? Why wasn’t the sun closer? Why weren’t things burning away?

“New Years,” Harry said suddenly, hastened.

“New Years?”

“Ed asked you about that?”

“Yeah. Said I had plans.”

”Oh? He told me to text you the address?”

“No, we didn’t decide on that?”

“Odd.”

“Odd.”

“Have you been crying.”

“No?”

“I’m home alone. I’m having tea.”

“Right,” Louis laughed. Harry and snow and staccato conversations. Grand. “Good for you?”

“Would you like some?”

His heart bobbed like a reverberating drummer’s gong, and maybe it wasn’t from the sudden encounter but from the cold. Maybe he had hypothermia. It made sense. Losing heat faster than his body could produce it. Metabolism slowing. Louis dying. The coldest, cruellest day.

“Come on,” Harry motioned sideways, feet veered to his house.

Having only Harry’s backside to look at elicited an uneasy jitter in Louis’ body as they got going, and he flicked over at the snowed-down thicket alongside them. The trees lurched coal grey and ghostly, and the hunched silhouette in front of him made for a crude little novel inside Louis’ head.

One last shiver zipped through him once their shoes brushed against against the doormat – prompting flashes of nails against blackboards and teeth chomping ice cream bars – while the surge of coffee and lumber swelled in the foyer. It undulated from the kitchen, where Harry went to get a pot sizzling. Tea was already splayed out on the island. “So I’ve got the same stuff as last,” he rumbled, “Pukkha, rosehip, lemon … Guess we’re not having Earl Grey, though.”

“Oh?”

“It’s not that early.”

In fear of ruining the tentative tea invite, Louis decided against mocking Harry for the possible Earl-y pun, mostly because he wasn’t sure it had been one. Harry’s lips hadn’t quirked at all as he rearranged the tea cartons a third time so it might have been nothing.

“Uhm …” his neck hunched even as he reached the top shelf for two mugs, indigo this time, “sorry for the last time you were here. I’m not much of a people person.”

“I wasn’t that chatty myself.” Louis canted his hips against the kitchen glass doors. He let his jacket slip aimlessly on a full copper log basket behind him. “So … you live with a misses here, or? Is it just you?”

“Cassandra. But she doesn’t really live here. Just drops by, kind of.”

“Mm. The girl at the café?”

“Yeah.”

Harry handed him over his mug on their way to the living room. Louis cocked his head at it as Harry jammed six logs into an inoperably narrow fireplace. Of all the sorts, Harry had plopped him Earl Grey.

“So,” he set them alight, “you’re not happy at home.”

Had people just stopped using question marks all together? Was it a thing? “Just gotta live there ‘til I earn enough to move out. Which won’t be long, rest assured. I mean, I’m 25. Should’ve left the nest long ago. It’s biologically unnatural.”

“I don’t know, consider Jesus.” Harry settled at the sill of a single hung window in a row of three, all facing the corner pub who was clad in multiple tangles of string lights. Maybe some event was going on.

“Jesus?”

“He stayed at home ‘til he was like 30, didn’t he?”

“Wasn’t that back in year 0?”

“Year 30, I guess?”

Louis shook his head, laughing. He burrowed well into a set of Egyptian scatter cushions on the sofa centred on the furnace.

“Oh, before you start I want to let you in on a little known secret. You wait two minutes for the water to cool,” Harry heaved his mug, bum perking to the very edge, “ _then_ you drink it.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“No?” His upper lip brushed the print of a rose petal. Louis noticed the whole mug was perennial-tinted; amanitas in full flourish.

“I think you were. And I think you’re not too used to it judging by how you blushed when I laughed just now, at your not-really-funny Jesus joke.”

Harry backed fully up against the icy glass, feigning shock. “I’m … I’m gobsmacked!”

“I’m a great believer in honesty, that’s all.”

“Oh, good, ‘cause you want to talk blushing? Guess who turned violet when I announced I’d be a regular at their café?”

“I was _not_ blushing!”

“You absolutely weren’t.”

“I wasn’t? Why would I blush? I love regulars!"

“You love me? That would explain the blush.”

“Ba … A … I …”

“Vowels. I’m impressed. Now do consonants.”

Louis thought. Double-checked. Quadruple-checked. And no. He’d never met anyone as razzing as himself. It was a first. He prayed for it to be the last, it was all levels of stressful.

And so what if he blushed? The living room was dimmed. In fact, the whole house was sombre. The main source of light was a weak gleam from the drabbed range hood above the stove.

It really was the perfect story.

A wheeze off the chimney yanked him out of further wool-gathering.

“So what about your love life.” Harry continued, morose. “Do you have a girl.”

“Just Hannah. But we’re not in a relationship. It’s more like … we’ve known each other for years and years. High school sweethearts,” he pressed a palm to his chest, “and then I moved and lived other places, came back at 23 and bam, we were at it again.”

“Is it like you’ll marry her.”

“Marriage, err …” Louis faked a chill, “not for me.”

“Divorced parents?”

“No, they’re just… mum and dad are the typical pair who should’ve given up a decade ago. They’re not happy.”

“So you wish they’d divorce.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how that’d go for my mum. Not overflowing with cash in our household.”

“She could move to a place with cheaper rent. Maybe find a job nearby so she could cut down on transport bills. She could be happier.”

Something about that gnawed. "Whatever.”

“Whiskey.”

_What now?_

Harry headed for a wrought ironed shelf next to the fireplace. His index and thumb balanced out two tiny tumblers with engraved anchors, and two bottles of glistening, honey-like scotch from behind the log basket.

“‘Irish Whiskey of the Year at the’–bajeebuz,” Louis sighed at one Harry handed him,“–‘Irish Whiskey Awards, and Double Gold Medal at the San Francisco World Spirits.’ So overdone, whatever happened to singular gold? ‘Notes of ginger, Brazil nuts, oak and whipped caramel that give way to a spicy finish of raisins and sherry.’ OK, that’s just freaky,” he quaffed his first serve and puckered his lips, “I was just about to say that!”

“’Midleton Very Rare, aged for 25 years.” Harry bracketed one against his folded knees where he’d repositioned at the sill. Gold and magenta tangoed in the liquid off the string lights. “A marriage of fewer than 100 casks of whiskey. Notes of creamy vanilla, butterscotch and summer fruits on the palate that give way to a long and slightly sweet finish. $139 a bottle.’”

“Sounds like sex.”

“$139?”

“Long and sweet finish.” Louis adjusted to submerge entirely into the gilted pillows. The swig of whiskey tasted of remote vineland and aeroplane tickets. “Hm. I want to travel some place.”

“A plane crashed and disappeared somewhere in the sea just yesterday morning." Harry wobbled his tumbler against an emerald kerosene lamp he'd lit in the corner of the window. "The Asian I think.”

“It’s always the Asian, isn’t it?”

“It’s every sea.”

“Guess you’re right. Rather be on ships. They’re made to float.”

“I like the sea. If I wasn’t a singer I’d be a sailor. That was my dream for a long time.”

“You’d look good as a sailor. No one to compete with that hair.”

“You’re silly.” Harry shook his head in three drooping beats. The words swallowed by the cracking fire.

Louis guessed a vague chance of Harry flirting, but instinct told him this was when he flirted the least. Watching Harry grin cockily and pass lazy-eyed stares to his friends was also when he flirted the least. All in all he was an empty shell, withdrawn by being exposed. Odd. And ironic. _He either flirts all the time_ , Louis pondered, _or he doesn’t at all_.

“What’s so great about the sea?”

Harry took a larger gulp, letting his big toe play with the spine of an atlas on the floor. “It’s big. It seems like forever.”

“I’d be terrified of forever.”

“You know how some people live in the philosophy of death getting them at any time and any day, so they live their lives to the fullest and they appreciate each second of it.”

“Yeah?”

“Not me.”

Louis erupted in laughter, crouching. It was so spot on.

A quirk hitched Harry’s lips. “I … like I understand that life is very short and very temporary. But that’s exactly why it’s forever. It’s forever while we’re here. So all that matters is how you want forever to be like. I’d take the sea any day. We barely know anything of it. Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing else on earth for me to do.”

“Land’s vast, though. I’m sure you’d find something.”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t think you’re lost because there’s truly nothing there, or nothing left for you to do. I think you’re lost because … maybe you’re tired of life and stuff, and maybe for a reason, you know? Like, maybe it does suck.” He sized the room mindlessly. Spread haphazard on the other sills and bookshelves were battered leather books and sizable snow globes, amongst lamps of any variation imaginable. Red and chestnut, partly black. None crossed the border to quirky. “Maybe you should leave stuff behind and just envelop the darkness, I dunno. It’s scary probably, and lonely and claustrophobic, but it’s better than deluding yourself into feeling mediocre hodgepodge, convincing yourself it’s worth it. That you just have to stick it through and accept things.”

“See. ’s a seafarer in you too.”

The flames reflected in Harry’s eyes a glassy kind of onyx. Like mercury. There was indeed a mercurial quality about Harry. Adroit tendons and cursory glances, though whenever the eyes locked with your own, it shocked.

 _Shocks the system_.

“You a Gemini, Harry?”

“Aquarius. You know Aquila?”

“We really are conversation jumpers, aren’t we?”

Harry snorted an, _anyway_. “The eagle, Aquila, snatched Ganymede – a young boy – and handed him over to Zeus, and they became lovers. In Olympus, Zeus granted him eternal youth and immortality and the office of cupbearer to the gods. The Aquila constellation is right above Aquarius, who symbolizes Ganymede.”

“You’re a young boy victim to a paedophile?”

“They were in love.”

“Funny. I’d rather consider you to be Zeus for some reason.”

“Yeah, I’ve never connected much to Ganymede. He was a fair looking boy tending sheep. Blue-eyed. But,” Harry shrugged. “’s just a myth.”

“Or maybe that’s how all great stories are remembered. Originally real, but depicted as archetypes as the centuries goes on. Like the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy is real when you’re a kid, until it suddenly ceases to exist. But maybe, when you’re a child, it is real.”

“I can’t tell if we’ve had too little or too much to drink.”

“Too little?” Louis surmised, and now Harry’s lips moved for sure. Though if it were a smile or not, no one knew besides the pub next door. He clearly wasn’t one for eye contact.

Also, it might have been because Louis’ voice had chopped.

It was embarrassing how his voice still cracked so many years after the sudden onset back at scout summer camp. He was 12 and set to perform All The Small Things by Blink 182 round a bonfire, in love with five of the eight girls watching him. He’d amped up his guitar heftily.

Now the only sound to cover it was a live version of Tangled Up in Blue on the radio from 1865 or whenever Harry had said it originated from – whose signals were volatile at best and sporadically abated. Did Harry listen to that stuff? Louis pictured him billow blues in the shower, mop of a hairstyle sticking to his cheeks, hands tight on the showerhead for mike _… And every one of them words rang true, and glowed like burnin’ coal, pourin’ off of every page like it was written in my so-_ “So where were you?”

Louis blinked. Where he was? Now?

“The years you were gone.”

“Oh. I was just doing some volunteer work in Cambodia, then ended in Australia for some reason. Worked at bars. I never really went for a degree or anything, and traveling was so much fun that I didn’t care if the money went out. Coming home was a blow. Still is.” He locked a stalemate with the fire to pinpoint the red.

“Australia …” Harry took a meticulous sip as if the country would reveal itself to him then. “Always wanted to go. My dreams are on Sydney. I’d name my daughter that.”

“Amazing place, Harry, the best. I’d name my daughter that, too. That, or Aurora.”

“Aurora’s pretty.”

“Sydney and Aurora.”

The red appeared. It coiled in a jerky dance.

“I miss that kind of freedom.” Louis said. “Sometimes I wonder how lost I got afterwards. As if a part of me doesn’t understand why it couldn’t stay that way forever. It’s a love, to travel. Maybe everything that feels free is love. Everything easy.”

“ _Easy_. That’s never easy.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“When.”

Louis’ index travelled absentmindedly cross the etched anchor. “Here and there.”

“That’s naïve.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Love’s like … spilling red wine on important papers or something, it doesn’t just tinge one paper, it goes through everything. It’s not a good thing.”

Piquing Harry’s meagre interest was a feat. Unbeknownst of why, Louis felt in possession of secret super powers. Though it was sad, of course. Sad how Harry viewed love. So sad, it could fill plenty of pages with words and poetry and maybe a lyric or two. Louis felt the pen in his pocket burn, the boy on the sill set fire.

OK, that whiskey probably did deserve all the praise it got; the alcohol set to whir at the well of his chest. “You could stay,” arced around him like on a loop. They were profoundly funny words, and Louis felt himself gush in breathy giggles. “Stay?”

“I won’t ask you for any more tea, I promise.” Harry rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Or is Hannah waiting for you.”

“I could’ve stayed whether I was in a relationship or not, Haz. Unless you’re planning on stealing me from all my admirers?” he splayed his feet on the tuffet, “‘Cause let’s be real, does anyone enough years left to pull that off in time?”

“A yes or no would do.”

“Well, I’ve got my dad’s car. Have to get it home by tomorrow. Or tonight, really. Fuck, I shouldn't be drinking, should I?”

“Just drive extremely slow. And don't finish your glass, probably. Are you coming on New Year’s then? Bring your mate who said I was funny. Him I can respect.”

Yet a shiver ran through Louis. Not so much from the cold but from the furnace's wind. He curled in on himself, pressing the glass to his chest.

“Want one before you go?”

Harry'd set to arrange tobacco.

Louis wasn’t one for smoking but he wasn’t one for turning it down when offered either. Having smoke stream in and out of you was a pleasant feeling after all, and while most people didn’t like the smell, Louis thought it had the air of a pickup truck in outback Santiago, or a bonfire in Juneau. The rush hour at a printing factory. He _had_ to travel.

He joined him on the sill. An almost yellow colour specked Harry's eyes, chartreuse in the winterlight backdrop. It was that numinous quality about the whole of Harry, the air of someone lonely from being brave. He had lost someone, Louis thought.

Surely he had lost someone.

“Sometimes the world is empty,” blurted out of his lips.

Harry licked the filter. “You could say that.”

“I mean, you go to a museum, what do you see? Things that’ve been,” he chuckled exaggeratedly, shaking his head like museums were the epitome of absurd and chimerical things. “Guess I’ll come on New Years’. Bring Niall,” he stated on, more to himself than Harry. He inhaled the cigarette in a rush before smudging it against the wall outside, refusing to watch it drift to the pavement. He set off in a spurt to the mudroom. “So I’ll see you then.”

 

Harry couldn’t help to think of the photo of Louis and the baby. Louis’ thighs had looked tan and footie trained. Now his neck was in his hallway, tucked in a very long, knitted red scarf – the width of which seemed to swallow him. He didn’t appear that tanned up close.

He pressed the Apollo Alarm system code as Louis set to amount the stone edging outside with whiskey-tinted balance. Bare sting nettles drooped atop an ashtray by his vans, rose stems standing silently opposite. He picked the head of a white rose, blighted with rime. “Wow, look at all this life growing all around you, Haz.” 

“Beautiful life,” Harry grouched.

“Here.” He reached. “I got it for you.”

“Aw. My first flower. And how beautiful it is. Brown around the edges, like singed.”

“Oh, you’re very welcome. Can’t say it’s the first time I give someone a rose, though I suppose it’s the first time I’ve given someone _parts_ of a rose.”

“Soul mates.” In Harry's graze, faint imprints of his thumb stippled its texture. Several petals fell right off, but a larger one remained.

“Proper twin flames.”

A silver Ranger Rover followed by a red double-decker whizzed by. The gates had fully opened, and Louis found his stare sink into the dusk woodland on the other side. With a short nod of silent farewell, he tucked his hands deep in his pockets to clamp against the cold.

Harry reactivated the alarm soon as the gates closed, turned off the range hood and reassembled the whiskey.

His mind envisioned the place Louis always seemed to park, which must’ve been somewhere down the lane, towards the pond and pass. _He’s probably in the dark._ Then he’d drive home. Lay down on a bed with his head on a pillow and bum on a mattress. Naturally. Naturally Louis slept on a mattress. With his head and bum on a mattress. _Gosh_ , his nostrils flared. This would be one of the nights his mind filled with senseless things.

 _ **Be safe x**_ he texted to preoccupy himself, receiving a reply in seconds.

_No further assaults so far xx_

_**Good. That’s my job.** _

_I’ll tell all future culprits that_

_**thanks in advance x** _

_do you even care what x stands_ _for_

_**it’s a way to end a sentence** _

_it’s kisses_

**_so? I send that to everyone_ **

_slut…_

_**haha says u. u sent me two** _

_typo ;) meant to say zz_

_**‘No further assaults so far zz …’** _

_snoooor!_

_**HAHA** _

_**oops caps lock!** _

_never underestimate the shock factor of caps lock_

_**hahah yeah … good night harry, GOOD NIGHT LOUIS** _

_is this when u think you’re funny_

_**we should add each other on snap chat I guess** _

_**im hazkaban** _

_tell me ur not serious_ he texted while adding him.

_**just tell me yours** _

_tealoveslou_

_**im covering my face with my palms** _

_if I were there I’d punch u_

_**please im stronger than u** _

_definitely not_

_**picking u up from the ground was like weighing a feather** _

_correction: id punch you in the balls*_

 

An alert went off on Louis’ phone.

It was a 10 second snap of the portrait of a feather. Probably from Harry’s room. He just knew the man owned quirky things.

 

_hilarious ! we’re arm wrestling come new years_

_**deal (x)** _

_save the x’s for ur gf :)_

_**she gets way more than kisses** _

_so only the less fortunate gets kisses?_

_**why notxxx** _

_how degenerate_

_I mean generous_

 

Another alert. It was yet a 10-second clip of Harry’s face smiling as he'd positioned on his tummy, then giggling, then full on pouting. The two last seconds rung with a husky voice from the speaker. “Looks familiar?”

 

_U could have told me ud seen them!! I've wondered 24/7 and refused to ask  
_

 

A beep once more. 3 seconds of Harry shrugging apologetically, shirtless in his bed by the looks of it, eyes popped innocent and wide. It had a text of **passwords are a glorious thing**

 

Heckler.

Louis spurted up the staircase once home, relishing in the crisp feel of his Batman bedsheets by coiling about like an upturned centipede. He realised it might’ve crossed the line to disconcerting as he bit giggles into the fabric, and it took several moments of readjusting his face before sending Harry back a snap.

Yawning, Harry clicked for the view of a blurry Louis, pixled and enveloped in blue flannel. His words were staccato sentences, not differing that of a robot; “I’m Harry. New Years. Home alone. Tea. I’m having tea. Whiskey! Cigarette. I’m having cigarette.”

Louis’ toes curled in tsunamic formations, waiting for the next. It was Harry laughing heartily, “You idiot,” ending with yet a pout and a text of **_xxxxxxxxxx_**.

Louis smacked back a kiss, blinking his eyes in goodnight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I don’t know the age of Louis’ sisters but in this one Lottie’s old enough to drive, obviously.)
> 
> And I KNOW, never drive drunk. I've no idea why my vision of Louis in this scene is doing exactly that. Never, ever drive drunk.  
>  
> 
> The title is based on Bob Dylan’s Tangled up in blue.
> 
> //And when finally the bottom fell out,  
> I became withdrawn  
> The only thing I knew how to do  
> was to keep on keepin’ on  
> Like a bird that flew,  
> tangled up in blue//


	4. Next Time I'll Be Braver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New Years, yey!

(December 31st, nine days to go.)

 

“2016.” A quiffed man sniffed up the remnants of powder off his nose. He sauntered the balcony’s railing with a slow gait in search of audience. “This is it.”

It was the strategy manager for Miami Viacom. Such important people were at the event, with faces too new, or insipid, for Harry to recall, but crucial connections to everything business and music they were. Media tycoons, top-selling musicians, graphic designers, property managers, executives of all kinds.

“This is it.” As Harry rose his cigarette as for toast, ash smithereens swerved down to those by the Haddonstone gazebo. To two girls kissing and their spilled rosé.

In a sight the 1800th century dwellers of Primrose Hill never would have envisioned, were fusillades in the shape of bursting charcoal, dotted with Hermès and multi-coloured hair from that dig down in Dalston. The night so very cold, it felt like any heat only catapulted you further into the chill.

Red bulbs still graced Nick's Christmas tree. It cornered dangerously close to a cackling fireplace no one dared be in vicinity of. Flames swum amber in flutes of champagne, currently held by an equally amber person. “Where’s the boy?” Ed nudged the glass doors with his foot to join Harry – Nick’s only insistence on buying a house anywhere were massive glass doors and balconies – and pass him a glass. 

“Who?” It was the Moet & Chandon Dom Perignon, Charles and Diana 1961. Which tasted like all the other champagnes Harry’d had in his life, if not more mildew-ish. He moiled it down. It’d taste better soon.

Ivan Aivazovsky's Waves hung still inside, obscured by glass and reflected fireworks. _Harry S._ stood incognito beneath a mass of party poppers on the table beneath. All he’d done was cramp himself into the left end of the table, nearest the bow windows, smoking and eating – mostly the former – and observe the pullulating crowd at the hill.

“Louis? Wasn’t that his name?”

“Not coming.” Cas appeared to their right. “I called him.”

“You …?”

“Got his number off your phone. What’s up with you two and kisses by the way.” She huffed, face metallic blue from the illumination off her phone. Pungent lavender hit Harry’s nostrils. She’d spent hours over at Ed’s bathroom, rubbing goo on her cheeks and tightening Diane's sequined dress.

He leaned his back on the doors for warmth just as Nick shouldered his 80’s cassette player to lure out the crew. "To the hill!"

Ed rushed for the kitchen to strap on his ukulele and took off in a gambol next to Nick; the two apparently a too good of a mix to pass up as their passel multiplied for each passing flagstone once outside.

 

Dew weighed the sod by the summit. Lampposts stood shrouded in an encompassing blanket of cinder. Then, a sharp whistle beneath Harry’s own nose had him startled. Contemplating the idea of death by jumping jack’s, which would be original if nothing else, (“… _It just blew up in his face_ …”) drowned in the shriek of a voice. “Happy new ye … Got stuck at ho … but havi … a blast ….”

“We’ll see you later, I’m sure Louis! Say hello to Niall!”

Harry’s eyebrows tensed. Louis? Niall? And his champagne was horrible. Much like he’d reminisced Charles and Diana’s marriage to be. He nicked a Heineken from Nick’s back pocket - an ice block in his hold. Damn December. Damn January.

An unfamiliar boy from the party bellowed into the speaker, causing a round of laughs. For some inexplicable reason, it came off like betrayal. As if someone had promised Harry they wouldn’t ever be happy again, and now they were. Every single person, not only around him but in the world. He tried to dissect this newfound laughter ugliness, and how come he hadn’t noted it before. Someone should avow it to writing. And now Heaven is a Place on Earth rung unforgiving at his head. “… Lo-ost at sea, I hear your voice, and it carries me.” Ed sang, though sonant, and nudged Harry by the elbow in between the hum. “When’s the tour?”

“April.”

“Oh. We’ve got some months then.” He mused unperturbed at the sky. Drinking straight from the bottle. “Carl’s coming over later, by the way. He’s got some nice weed. You remember? That last time? Shitfaced we got, too.”

“I’m not having any.”

“Clean year?”

“’s just a no. Cas called Louis,” Harry sighed and nudged towards them. The little boy-person would _not_ stop bellow to the speaker.

“Oh, it probably means nothing, mate. Pretty sure Louis' gay.”

“What? No? No, they’re not … No, she interferes. She checks my phone.” He swilled down half the Heineken. Now his throat was an ice block, too. “Look. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m gonna go.”

“Go? Where?”

“Home.”

“Oh. OK.”

It felt odd pushing Ed away but he’d probably get used to it. Emotions streamed through Harry like a dingy sewage and why anyone termed him _mate_ or _nice_ , he didn’t know. And for the rest … They’d get wasted off the punch balls on the cigar tables back at Nick’s. Or hump newfound folks at the hilltop. Mankind's future had never been more auspicious. “Tired.”

Ed's humming had stopped. Maybe he understood. Probably not. “That’s cool mate, text me later, yeah?”

“Yeah. Cool.” Harry could barely make out his own voice, as if him leaving was a thing of fiction. His feet aimed him out the park none the less, and jingles off bumping glasses farewelled him out to Regent Park Road. “ _8-7-6_ …” While hailing a taxi off the corner adjacent Rothwell Street, a girl in stilettos halted in a chase after her friends, and stopped dead as their eyes met. “Harry Styles? Oh my fucking god! _Harry Styles?_ ”

In mere seconds, phones were in his face, and he just really, desperately needed a smoke.

“Oh, my god, happy New Year’s, Harry!” One of her friends shrieked.

“When’s the new record ready, Harry? We thought it was March but someone told us it'd be earlier!"

“Is it true you’re gay? Did Nick …” Giggles. “Did Nick blow you that time?”

He jolted his lanky frame into a mauve velvet quilt and slammed the door shut in their faces soon as the taxi pulled over. “Duke’s, New End Road.” He didn’t blow kisses or waved back at any of the girls, unfazed with their perceptions of him. “Fans are all you’ve got,” Ben pushed in every meeting, “fans are the core.” And Harry knew.

He knew.

 

Obscured human shapes flew by him as if the entire outside world was a watercolour streak. Harry didn’t know what that meant he himself was. Right now he was a person amidst a commotion of cow figurines and pine-scented wunderbaums dangling in the cab’s front mixed with a thick tang of rosemary. With the rain beginning to drizzle down outside, he figured he wouldn’t be allowed to open a slit for smoke. And maybe that’s all there was to him.

An empty man with a lighter in his hand.

 

The driver veered in in front of another taxi on the sidewalk. “Here.”

“But this is Pond Street. And,” he tried to make up the smudge of a bar sign. “Kiss the Sky?”

“No longer. Here.”

To hell with stuff then.

The taxi drove off, soaking his skinny white jeans with splatter.

The streets were deluged with rain, and he was near to barrelled into the gutter by a man passing on greets of a great twenty-sixteen. “Love is all there is, love is all around! Year of the Monkey! Huzzah!”

People wandered up the streets beneath zigzagging fairy lights. They don’t know it’s year 4714 in China, Harry miffed, and felt the icy sludge on his legs begin to stiffen. China haven’t even celebrated yet; not until February 19th. He wished they’d wait until then in the UK too, so that … Yeah. He really wished they’d wait.

And after the saunter up Rosslyn Hill, he reached the cul-de-sac of Duke’s, saw it was chock full and ditched his initial plans. He gaited on through the cobblestone byways, finally reaching the lane. His lane. He was alone there. No party. No 2016. A skyline of smog presented itself through the trees to his left; a scintillated orchestra of lit pother. The wharf. Oxford Street. Hackney in east. He sucked it in, a lump of liquorish-tasting spit huddling at the back of his throat.

It was a pretty park. A pretty London.

He shut his eyes. Cars deafened out behind.

It hadn’t snowed in a while.

He didn’t want to be so close to home, not now when he suddenly felt so free, when it wasn’t so cold after all. He continued pass his house, all the way to the adjoining Sheldon’s Avenue – where his left thigh whirred to the phone in his pocket.

_it’s a new year!_

_**my friends love you** _

_haha ya they’re nice:)_

_**where are you?** _

_the neighbours garage. u?_

_**walking home, long day** _

_shame!!_

_**yeah. u didn’t come?** _

_didn’t have the car :(_

_**what are u doing in a garage?** _

_roman candles and barrages!!!! we’re a big group its great fun:)_

_**you should NEVER light those in a garage** _

_no no I’m on a camp chair right beneath the rollers we have opened to watch the fireworks. isnt it raining where you are? we’re only like 10 minutes apart_

_**I see. no rain here.** _

_Guess hampstead was the place to be tonite_

_**was fine. People without names kind of** _

_how intimate:) could I call u?_

_**I’m home in a sec so will just get into bed and then we can talk** _

_cheeky_

_**fingers are cold.… btw u know cas saw our messages? she said ‘whats up with you two and kisses?’** _

_hahahahhah jealous im stealing her boi?_

_**haha unfortunately no, not jealous at all** _

_aw poor baby_

 

A trail of fireworks followed Harry from afar as he scurried the last slot home. He amassed a clutter of pillows once on his bed after jamming out of his jeans and shirt, cracked open the window by the bed and splayed out in a starfish. A breeze wisped his chest and it felt like being free. He’d gladly pay the price of stiff nipples.

He dialled.

 

“Harreh?”

“Drunk, are we?” He dabbed the tip of his just-made Prince on the sill. “I can hear you giggle.”

“A bit drunk yes!” He’d bet money on Louis raising his index to the air just now, “But not that drunk. And you Hazzie Berry, why aren’t you at a party, celebrating January?”

“I was.”

“And now you’re home.”

“Yes.”

“Macarena-ing by yourself in your disco lights …”

“I’m lying in the dark.”

“Thought I heard music, my bad … So you’re lying in bed in the dark … with my beautiful voice in your ear … and I am here, watching a heart explode in the sky.”

“Advanced.”

“The neighbour’s got the best equipment each god damn year. I mean, I’m not bothered, but just why would you spend … wait … hold on …”

A snap.

Harry opened.

Two kids ran up and down the street, channelling their inner rackets, it seemed. Suddenly he was faced with a dark-haired boy.

“That was Stan and that’s all you need to know,” Louis’ face reappeared. He gushed down a can of beer and spurred down the street the kids had just gone. “I’m taking you on a tour around the block, Harry,” he whispered excitedly. His breathing sped up as he ran to what must’ve been the neighbours’ house. The snap ended but a new one appeared in a jiff. “I’m beneath the Werthson’s porch,” he whispered lower. It was argute even then. “Now, if I just angle this …”

Harry panicked. _We’re on their land!_ He’d always taken a heed for other people’s stuff and things.

Then something sallied. A rose fanfared across the sky, accompanied with low jabber from next to Louis. His friend had probably come along. The friend Harry had seen. The dark one.

It ended.

“You’re crazy!” he rang him up, wide-eyed.

“Ssssh! I’ll call you in two!”

 

16 minutes on, Harry had made himself some wolfberry tea accompanied with yet a cigarette to calm down. Camping beneath people’s porches … Who does that? And why? Why did people do the things they do? The screen flashed with Louis’ name as he burrowed his nose into his brew.

“Impressed?”

“Dunno. Maybe. Was pretty.”

“So. Told my friends about you. No biggie, just thought I’d tell you in case you ever meet them because they’ll be all over you for photos. Because you’re a celebrity. But I’m not mad for not being told. Nope. Of course not. Not at all.”

“Is that what took you so long to call me back up? You ran a google search?”

“I actually tripped into some nettles – side note; they don’t give one fuck that it’s winter and they’re supposed to be dead – and then one of my little sisters tried to fire off this homemade firework thingy and you know, big bro to the rescue. God, that hideous person she refuses is her boyfriend made it, and I just … I don’t _hate_ him but I can’t … I just can’t … He wears _fedoras_? Then I entered this year long beer drinking competition I’ve got going with my mates, and this is the 10th time I win so I’m the holder of the grand prize; a total of six pints. That’s a low budget six pack from Tesco’s, if you’re keen on the details. ASDA Lager. But I see what you’re doing here, Harry, and what you’re doing is trying to get away with explaining being a renowned popstar.”

Harry smiled at the ceiling. His right hand idled in circles on his chest. “I honestly thought you had a small clue.”

“I don’t pay attention to those things!”

“Clearly.”

“You could’ve told me.”

“It’d be narcissistic.”

“It’s all so typical, innit?” he heard him sigh, certain he placed the back of his hand to his forehead, “I probably had snot out my nose or something that last time. And what did I wear the first time we met? An XL jeans jacket with a weed sticker, is what.”

“Oh, the snot. I’d almost forgotten it until I got glued stuck in the couch yesterday.”

“And I must’ve smelled like cabbage that second time we tried bonding over tea. We’d had stuffed stew for supper that day.”

“You smelled nice from what I can recall.” He leaned his cheek onto the sill. The draft was so refreshing. “It was probably me who didn’t smell too good. I fell into fox excrements on my jog.”

“No, you smelled like white.”

“White?”

“White.”

“What smell is that?”

“I dunno … light?” A pang throbbed sounding close to Louis. “Look, I’m gonna head back to the guys, looks a bit reclusive chatting to the mailbox here by myself.”

“Oh, didn’t mean to keep you.”

“You didn’t keep me.” It sounded muffled, like he spoke into a scarf. That his feet shuffled. Harry roused to the quiet in his own room. He’d been whispering too, as if there was someone to stir. But everything was so, so still.

“OK.” He tramped down the stairs to the living room to crack open a window and tune in for the pub close by.

“OK.”

“Tell them I said hi.”

“OK, I will.”

“OK.” Harry lit a cig, heaving his entire upper body out to the air. There were people there. Some waltzing. All laughing.

“Good night, then.”

“I’m not gonna sleep.”

“Oh. Did you want to come here?”

“No, I’m tired. It’s just that I can’t sleep.”

“Well. You’re welcome here anytime. Not just now, you know. There’s always beers. Underrated if you ask me, ASDA.”

They were muffling again.

Harry exhaled the smoke. It obscured an old man stepping. “Thank you.” He wasn’t sure it was vocal.

“I’m having one in the shower right afterwards actually.”

“One of those you won.”

“The taste of victory. And cold drops, our shower pipes needs fixing.”

“At least you’ve got your Batman bedspreads after. All eleven of them.”

“Hey, it’s only one! It’s just very big.”

“Or you’re very s-”

“Don’t go there. I might be small but … yeah, I dunno,” he laughed, “My ass is outta this world?”

Harry swallowed a snort and bit his lip to stifle it. “Sure, well. Enjoy the wet cold.”

“I will. Enjoy wanting desperately to sleep but not being able to.”

“I will.”

 

_Click._

 *

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Titled based on lyric from Turning Tables by Adele, inspired by live version at Largo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w44dk4ysnz8
> 
> //Next time I'll be braver  
> I'll be my own savior  
> Standing on my own two feet
> 
> I won't let you close enough to hurt me,  
> No, I won't rescue you to just desert me//


	5. Your Scarecrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> January

“Notes of blackcurrant and strawberries?"

“Right you are, Mr. Bonnaleigh, pulped natural, of course.”

“Of course, of course … and if it’s any omen for our business, the Gourmet Cup of 2014 certainly didn’t damage the method’s reputation.”

_Good gracious._

“Though this one, arriving straight from Bolivia last afternoon, has a sharper tinge to it, with notes of citrus and earth.” The man indulged in a non-subtle session of lip-smacking. “And jasmine. Re-passed, mind you.”

Silent facial expressions of repulse ghosted the room. Louis felt some of them directed at his seasonal Santa hat. (It created a positive vibe for the customers, Isac'd stated).

 

The larder’s wooden floorboards tainted with coffee grounds and particles of steamed milk - everything exposed in the glare from the lofty windows facing Park Street.

Coffee Alchemy was an epicentre when it came to coffee tastings and barista courses, all intermediate or advanced, and Becks conjugated partnership with them. Part of Louis’ priming was to spend a few days there for coffee tastings and hectic midday rushes. Currently on the former, his newfound colleagues, German manager Isac, Swedish Anne-Birgitt and American Mathilda were left to tackle the 3 o’clock buzz.

“I don’t mind offering our customers tastes of lemon and perfumes per see, but coffee wise – what’s the strongest, most pungent coffee-tasting coffee you have of the lot, hm?” Louis’ bum perked at the edge of his seat, foot beckoned at a bean sack with B R A Z I L sewn in bold. Footie and beaches and wild rainforests; surely Brazil could muster up proper coffee.

“Bourbon Santos!” the coffee guy exclaimed. “What great palate you have, Larry! Some say the most intense taste of pure coffee on that side of the Atlantic. Strong … Would you care for a taste?”

“Sure. It’s Louis, by the way.”

“Oh, my apologies. Liam’s mine.” He manoeuvred through a patchwork of predated coffeemakers in prudent steps, palms embracing the fresh roast of Santos. It shimmered hollow in the porcelain cup, thick as ink.

“Good for you,” Louis quizzed tersely. He wasn’t exactly trying to chat him up.

“Yes, well.” Liam folded his hands behind his back. “I was just so sure that … or it might have been nothing … that you mistakenly, entirely without intention, mind you, called me Le Anne just before.”

“Oh, I did! I thought you were a woman! Like, before I actually saw you. I just … yeah.”

Certainly the leaflet had plenty of women in it (clad in coconut bras and laughing in the shade of mango trees) and though not expecting a full-blooded, silicone breasted Brazilian, Louis was sure he’d seen the name Le Anne printed at the seminar info on page 3. Whether that admixed with Liam was not his fault, surely.

In proper knight in shining armour style, Isac’s white head of hair popped in the door that instant. “Louis, mate, getting hectic.”

“Well, Liam." The chair brawled in his rise. "The Brazilian for Alchemy then.”

 

Besides Becks, Louis had also landed a job as a barkeeper near Bluebell Woods - a boscage peppered with 120 year old tree trunks. Rivulets trickled through the landscape, winter-barren of things such as nodes, leafs, life ... but it had its very own enticing charm, he affirmed to himself on a daily basis. He'd lobbed pebbles down the slope near a viaduct, immersed to the sound of cars deafening in the bluster of fusing waters.

The carrot of it all was being granted a stay on the pub’s upper floor.

The tiles had zero isolation and he survived by the nightly use of three lamb wool blankets. The windows were feeble; their curtains the strangest ability of enhancing the cold. Internet came and went. The flushing button of the toilet got stuck by random. It had atmosphere, was the thing. Throw rugs monopolized near to every inch and Louis stepped on them (pranced, but who was watching) at cockcrow o’clock, tea in hand, smug gleam in his eyes. A stopgap kitchen with a contradictive high tech coffeemaker. Six mugs and none alike.

His impetus for writing had taken off, too. It evolved in tandem with the amount of window-chilled red wine he drank, and the volume of theatrical songs à Whitney Houston and Celine Dion. It felt offbeat and novel. Hard to describe.

 _Renown Writer Traveling The Globe_ , his inner eye saw the papers assert, side-noting his rare afflatus of igniting passion in people who up until Louis thought they were alone in the world, too.

 

_And if by chance that special place_

_That you've been dreaming of_

_Leads you to a lonely place_

**_Chapter One._ **

 

Whitney sure knew how to speak to his soul.

Flapping over on his belly one morning, he’d given his bum a firm squeeze. The flesh was soft like the skin beneath his upper arms, white as the snow battering down outside, trickling mud-like down the panes.

By 7:12, he was out of the shower to towel dry with the creative uses of kitchen cloths and Fizzy’s lime feather boa. She was due to know he borrowed it any day now. And just like this very moment, he’d quaffed a brew of espresso, mindlessly tangling his hair into a cone with a felt-tip with both letters and plan somewhat askew.

_* not daydream about publishing but actually do it. random house??_

_* Stack savings in high-int. account_

_* seriously consider real estate._

_* invest?? be an inve-_

“Shattered and smothered. Me and my balance.” A tray of leftover scones blitzed past him. “And you seem way too excited to reach the end of your shift? Afternoon’s rush is sometimes the worst, FYI.” Mathilda tossed the fragmented lot in a bin. The back alley of the café was a narrow, smelly passage.

Anne’s Swede accent sang through the glean of the door as it shrilled closed behind them, informing a customer that his or her beverage was too hot to drink just yet.

“I’ll remember you all in my Kafka award speech.” Louis swirled a generous _stor_ and a resolute dot. “Petronella, is it?”

“Funny. So, Liam’s down by Gail’s. Said we have to pick up the loads there. Would you mind? And also check in on with the post office on the shipment from Barbados we ordered? It should’ve been here by now. Or are you …” She peered at his newly found escape route. “Busy?”

“Nope.” He chucked the dwindling fag out of his mouth, teeth grinding immediately.

 

The only congruent thing in Louis’ mind as he sprinted to the underground, was how each years’ January was a photo still embroidered in delicate frost. The leafs scrunched up from where they hung, swivelling down to form pile upon pile, crunched to ashy fragments by patent leather shoes.

Bloody, hilariously freezing.

Liam held fort at a busy road in Covent Garden, adjacent with Alchemy’s – and most other cafe's – designated post office. With Liam's product clamped to the pit of his arm, it was with a haggard look he was informed of a delay in means of transportation out of Barbados. Which was ridiculous, and _three_ weeks overdue.

 

“No package from Barbados!” He brought the fluster with him all the way back to Alchemy's, legs throbbing beneath the too-thin fabric of his coal grey jeans. An Independent rustled open. “Their mail system must be fucking dysfunctional. Those are the _best_ beans. I’ve told everyone about it. Arthur, Gustaf, Bobba … They leave for Greenland tomorrow, did you know? Well, how can you … You don’t know them. They're up at Becks. Well, at least I got the Brazilian beans.” He did an intake of breath. “Sally, though! You know Sally, the woman with an ostrich feather in her hat who always sits by the bannister! Even she knew about those beans. And she’s into tea! Well, her and me both. Nothing beats a fine cup of tea.”

He lobbed off the beans by the entry before setting to clean out the coffee machine for warmth. “And is it just me or was that coffee presenter person kind of cute? Lee-am.” He clucked his tongue to have a nip at the word. “Lima. Hah. That’s the capital in Peru. I’ve never been but I wouldn’t mind. Or Chile and Argentina. For the vineyards.”

“Go for the wine, I say.” Anne-Birgitt chucked the Christmas stocking hat back down his ears. “Less caffeine.”

“Long black!” Isac called behind their necks.

Only as the customer came to get it, did Louis finally lift up his head.

His arm stilted.

 _Common streak for absent-mindedness_ , Harry mused, stirring his fresh brew.

Glancing at Louis’ jumper – reindeer motifs and glitzy bombardments – he found the muscles beneath flexing on own accord, and Louis’ arm spanned to scrub rabid, more violent arches.

“Twelvetide.” Harry cleared his throat. Louis’ lips motioned, as if to suck in breath. Harry tried again. “The hat, I me-”

“Lou! I call shit on that treasure chest you believe exists!” A battered piece of paper flapped in Niall's sinewy hand from where he burst in the door.

Louis twisted to see him, but Harry’d turned as well, and now his sloppy head of hair was in the way, baby ringlets plastered down his nape. It’d made his white shirt wilt all the way to his tailbone.

“Honestly Ni, no paper deserves this much ruckus,” Louis sighed and put on three Santo's for feedback. He brought them over in tiny cups filled to the brim, and joined them by the thick plank nailed before the window - now a makeshift table. 

”See.” Niall sipped, spreading open the booklet. White candles flickered along it, casting shadow puppets on a greasy print of 1883’s Zimbabwe. Rivers and gravel roads served as main directions; presumably still did. “Pie in the sky. Never existed.”

Harry crouched on a stool next to them, brows arched. “Is it supposed to be something else there?”

“There’s an ancient, mysterious city located somewhere in the Zimbabwian woods, I know for sure I saw it on History Channel. Though based on a sheet from before the Earth’s existence, I guess the scientists are just entirely wrong.” Louis hopped out the door to stack the outside chairs and chaine them secure in preparing for closing. He did it fast enough in time to catch Niall's response back in.

“Mate, _pretend_ you haven’t grown a boner imagining yourself discovering it.”

“Never needed porn less, Ni." He scrubbed rime off his fingernails. "Happy days.”

“I’ve heard of it, actually.” Harry supplemented. “Not a real thing.”

“Louis’ boner?” Niall sniggered.

“Guess it died alongside adventure.” Louis said petulant, hat tassel dropped into the dip of his collarbone, alarmingly close to a candle. Coffee steam oozed up his chin, and with the rosy glow off the tapers, his flesh appeared illuminated in gold. “I, for one, like to keep my wanderlust alive.”

He thought the coffee was a perfect cherry blend, _kudos Lima,_ and let it spike his neurons and sprinkle oxygen to his nostrils. It paired well with the day, which had come with a sort of impatience to it, as if the darkness couldn’t come fast enough; waiting for the world to turn.

Lanterns spotlighted navy blue snow. Cherry lollipops glistened in their beacon. Two elders clinked glasses over a snigger and a chat. A cat astray scurried to dodge the many boot-clad feet.

“You wanna go out with us, Harry?” Niall slurped. It rung louder than the Spotify playlist; a female vocal covering Mumford & Son’s Believe. “Me and Lou and some mates are to get knackered on some unknown glorious waterhole in London. Not set in stone yet, the location. Or the date, really. Later this week, maybe?”

“I’ve got plans on going out on Thursday. It’s with Ed and a few more. You guys could join? Or were you thinking of something in particular?”

“Nah, that’s brill! Where, though?” Niall asked, looking sorry. “Nothing fancy in my cupboard, ‘m afraid. Except, of course, my polka dot button-up.”

“You seriously own a polka dot button-up? I do too. I never wear it, though.”

“Maybe if you sewed a hoodie to it.” Louis suggested, taking strange pleasure of Harry being too befuddled for words.

“But what should you wear.” Niall’s piercing blue measured Louis head to toe. “Odd look if me and Harry wear a polka dot shirt and you don’t.”

“Me not wearing a polka dot button-up is not what would make that odd.”

“You can borrow mine.” Harry, too, raked his frame. “We’re equally narrow.”

“Your chest’s a tad wider. Which you know, and just wanted me to confirm out loud. Corrupted popstar.”

Niall shrugged. “Come naked then.”

“You guys would’ve love that, wouldn’t you … ‘Oh, look at that scrawny and narrow guy! Nothing like us, with our wide expanse of a gorilla chest.’”

“Gorilla chest!” Niall whooped.

“Alright, enough with this size obsession of you two! I’m excited for this party. I love a good night out.”

“What don’t you love.” Harry muttered.

“One time visits at my café. I frown upon it. Look.” He scrunched his nose.

“To be fair, this is the first time you’ve been here, and it was mainly just for the coffee tasting, no?” Niall said genially. "Besides, hard luck running into you on your coffee sprees, mate. It if weren't for the, like, 20 texts you sent about needing company down here, I'd never bothered down to Alchemy. And if it weren't for that last message, I never would have thought of bringi-"

“Oh, hush, you sweet Niall!" Louis' voice hitched, "I _am_ forever grateful, of course, of course. Busy days, is all … As the matter of fact, we’re closing in just a few.”

“Gotta scoot anyway,” Niall flung on his battered Audi cap. "Margarita at Domino’s. Catch up with you lads later.” He swivelled the cap for grandeur flare, and out trailed a concoction of cackles and merry farewells.

“What’ve you got there?”

Louis turned to find Harry lock eyes with the slipshod scribbles crammed up in his pockets. “Plans for my life.”

“’ _sell fucking hous_ -’”

“Oh, no need to read it all.” He scrambled it deeper down. “It’s just a bit of a financial plan, kind of. Build my life. You know the drill. But alright! Thursday, yeah?” Harry shook his head, chuckling. Honestly, Louis didn’t have time for this. “Something up?”

“Are you one of those types who wake up at 6 AM without being tired.” _Loss of the question marks, The Reruns_ , Louis sighed. “Like you just lay there,” Harry closed his eyes for demonstration, “and _BOP_! You’re awake.”

“Of course not, no one does that, Harry.”

“I’d say you do.”

“Well, you’ve never woken with me so what do you know.”

“I’ll bet money on it. I can tell you need money.” He nudged at the tousled papers of financial doom and gloom. “I’d bet a hundred pounds.”

“Yeah, well. How would you ever be sure, hm?” He brought with him their empty mugs and placed them by the vessel sink behind the counter. “Now I don’t mean to be dismissive but my future’s on the line. And we did kind of round up the conversation, I just assumed we were through.”

“Well, I’d like a black white to go then, please.” Harry positioned with face angled for the windows, hip jutting the till.

Surely, Louis thought, he’d been one of those annoying students in class who came in an hour late, blowing bubble gum and jolting people in the back of their heads nagging for pencils. _Bad times indeed._

“Sorry, love, we don’t serve black whites.”

“Flat white.” Harry eye-rolled. “A flat white, please.”

“Why would you want that, anyway? You’ve already got a coffee?”

“It was a long black. Now I want something milky.”

“But, like, why?”

“Surely you can’t rely on tips.”

Louis cleared his throat, heaving his chin for professional flare. “3.20, please.”

Harry handed him a warm - moist? - fiver. “Keep the change.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“I’d be a regular.” Harry said. Maybe to fill the sudden silence. Or maybe it wasn’t silence. Maybe it needn’t be filled. “But you’re everywhere, so. I don’t know where I’d adopt the regular customer lifestyle.”

Louis contemplated. A last customer sorting in files to her handbag. The groans from the wooden door informed the wind had escalated, and she stepped out the stoop with hair flung in an arc. “Well, there’s a standard test for that whichever café one revisits.”

“Test?”

“Just ask Klara over here,” he nodded at Mathilda, “on the first day of being a regular, you have to show dedication. It’s the matter of being early on in the game, like Arthur so admirably did decades ago. You just go out the door where you came from, then back in, and out again, then back in, and do over once more. Takes 20 seconds, tops.”

Harry viewed him hesitantly.

“For dedication.” Louis curled a fist to his heart.

“Odd how only two of your friends’ve dropped by today.” Mathilda rolled her eyes at him and offered Harry an empathic smile, handing over his flat white in a Styrofoam cup. A droplet spilled down the groove from Harry’s thumb in the taking, and she immediately provided him with a napkin.

“Thanks, Klara.” He said.

She gave a nonplussed look, settled for it not being worth it and headed for the rolling up of awnings. Harry traced her figure with a mechanical glance, beckoning to nod goodbye to Louis before exiting and becoming a comingled blodge in the raggle-taggle outdoor.

Louis tiptoed to fetch his bomber jacket and counterfeit Sanqvist backpack from the hatstand, and signed out the cash register with practiced jabs. “I’m fucking off now.” He singsonged out the door, pinching an unaware Isac’s bum in bypassing.

“Enjoy it!”

“Ha!”

 

Fastening the second loop of his scarf, a whirlwind of snowflakes capered around him like a cloak before settling on a row of haggard shrubs. He scoped the bus stop across Black Friars Lane.

A dark hoodie crystallized into view amongst the white spectacle, leaned up against the pole of the traffic lights. An air of rubber and exhaust hovered at the spot, seeping to the sky along with lingering perfumes.

“The bus is late.” Harry muttered in his approach, inducing a sceptical eye from a bystander woman.

“Yeah, it doesn’t really feel like a surge of people has only just stood here at all. Tell me missy,” Louis beckoned for the lady, “how long’ve you stood here, anxiously await?”

“Nothing left of your shift at all?” Harry’s shoulder forged against Louis’ bicep. It borderlined a shove, and formed an invading stance who blocked the woman out of view.

“Nope. A stranger left this really huge tip so I saw no need to stand there and loaf. I was on the verge of quitting, so large was the tip.”

Harry’s lips teetered. If that was how he looked when holding back a grin, Louis wondered what it looked like when on the verge of tears. “You’re too proud for 100 pound bets but now a fiver’s too small. Why don’t you just tell me what you want.”

A giant red object droned up their side. “Departure time, Baby Ringlets.” Louis goaded him forth with a press of his palm. Settling shoulder to shoulder at the very front of the bus, a rush of sudden gratitude came to bombard Louis’ heart.

 _You didn’t have to wait_. Too melodramatic.

 _It was sweet of you to wait._ Ugh.

 _Are you cold? Do you want tea?_ Very maternal-sounding.

“Feels like it’s my turn to offer tea. If you’d want.” He settled for, beanie bunched up in his lap.

“Hm … Uhm …”

“See, those aren’t words. Is it my use of question marks that throws you off-guard?”

Despite their general communication – face to face and at arm’s length – Louis could make out even more details through this peripheral angle. First off, the lips were wisp, as if puff once. Also, three pimples graced his temple. The miniscule prods of scruff down his neck were not as protruding as that beneath his nose. Opposing his timeworn ink and venerable career, the eyes flicked adolescent.

Shifty and overwrought.

“Shut up.” Louis was jabbed softly in the side. “Yeah. Whatever.”

They clambered each their poles through a doglegged turn. Louis wondered whether this might be the time to bring up the facts of how London’s buses have been tested for how much of a degree they can tilt in a corner before side-smacking the ground. Harry didn’t look much in the mood, though, eyeing each new traveller up and down mechanically, tracking their steps as they filtered in. Men and women and schoolkids and elders. Louis wondered what it meant. Or why he assumed it meant anything at all.

A mellow ding sounded at the nudge of the stop signal; _Dagger’s Lane_ announced in static voice.

 

“Fuck, it’s cold.” Out on the street, Louis fished out a significant key assembly off his backpack, shaping a beeline through the crowds into what appeared would be a face first against a bricked wall. With the jolt of his hip, he rammed open a red-lacquered door. It neighboured a cobalt one, belonging to a pub who lilted jazz. _Cloak & Dagger_ hung askew above it. “Bit creaky. Dusty. Nothing like yours. Like … this is another planet compared. So mentally prepare yourself for everything not-yours.”

Harry took prim steps through the cemented hallway and up a steep staircase for a final door. “It’s fucking colder inside. Can you really live here?”

Louis inched in a key with a final, practiced flick. On a sharp right was a slim bed which he lobbed his backpack on. Sounds of a woman's voice singing about Texas amplified through a 20-centimetre hole beneath the wonky headboard, along the aroma of stouts.

“Holy fuck!”

A cat sprawled alive at where Harry meant to sit on a crocheted tuffet.

“Dorothy, sweetie, how’s your day?” Louis patted her head, then mounted the benchtop to crack open the window. He saw no need to get the windowsill black from in-air must. With a student loan and a shower clogged by Irish gag (he winced; he’d meant to desert that memory all together) zero financial risks were to be taken.

“You have a cat?”

“The bar below does. She visits sometimes. Most days, really. I’ll prep the tea, just need a 30 second shower. Gone about sweaty all day.”

“Sure.” Dorothy allowed Harry to place her on his lap. She was a beautiful molly with patches of auburn, black and grey. Revelling in the softness, he did a 360 for intake of terrain.

At his right hung a shelving unit with glass jars bearing different jams; gooseberry, blackberry, and an apple one with large chunks of the fruit in it. Harry was unsure whether they should look that particular shade of green. On the lower shelf lined wine glasses and Toby mugs, one brimming with paperclips. Then terrycloths and a turquoise teapot labeled Dirty Spoons. It contained a single ladler.

“Minimalistic.” He called, scratching Dorothy gingerly by the whiskers. Her purring died with Hey, Hey, We’re The Monkees, claiming the limelight on 96.4 buzzing from the countertop.

“No maintenance, though,” Louis called.

 

Harry noted a scuffed sofa right by the bathroom door. It was next to a door leading to the smallest of terraces, appearing one gust away from eternal state of awry. It proportioned with the skew world map atop the sofa.

“I have my coffee every morning right where you’re sitting now.” Louis plodded out for the kitchen, hair wild and damp; a towel cross his waist. He filled up the water boiler and flicked it on. “Staring at the world and trying to get inspired. Work can be so menial, you know.”

“I know.”

“Harry.” He chided, summoning Fortnum’s Royal Blend from a gilded tin box. “Like you know the meaning of the word. You’re a global superstar. Who refuses to tell people of the fact. Not gonna pretend like I’ve forgotten!” He undecided on the teas and placed them back.

“It’s meetings, air planes and jotting down words for lyrics. There’s not much more to it.”

“Business, hey? Try handing over coffee to impatient customers off to their own horrendous jobs in the morning, while being so knackered you can’t even make brew it right. I bet all of my coffee tastes like sour socks.”

“Your coffee’s not sour. And in a way, our jobs are not that different. I have impatient, not too nice people I deliver to too. I get knackered as well.”

“From all the unbearable first class travels … I hear ya, Hazzie. Every time those stewardesses come over to refill the beluga caviar, it’s like, god, don’t they get I’d rather have Krug instead? We’re not too unlike, you and me.”

Harry chuckled at Dorothy, caressing her chin. “Well, go on, Lou Balloo. Explain to me your larger-than-life knackeredness.”

“It starts off in my bed beside a radiator designed for, you won’t believe it, cold snaps and decay.” Tufts of hair obscured Harry’s view of Cape of Good Hope as Louis scampered for the bathroom again. He could hear his words strangle as he rigged on a shirt, or his tank top maybe, and jumper - breathing increasing for the squeeze into his leggings. “One of a kind in the whole world, it is. Then I stretch. Sore bones, stiff neck, all that. Airplanes usually rumble right above the rooftop smack in the middle of that routine, headed to and off City Airport. How many mornings our paths must’ve crossed this way. You up there, exhausted. Me down here, enthralled with your noisy means of transportation. Then comes the walk down to Becks where unyielding wind pierce my nipples to shreds. Come summer, I’ll wear some thin garment and you’ll see how they flap against it.”

Then I make zero money during a 10 to 12 hour workday, seeing how all of it ends up in insurances, food, rent and a total of five whole quid for savings every thirtieth. For motivation, I drink lots of wine and write lots of made up stories, real to no one but myself. And every morning I continuously wake up grumpy … cold … stiff, and knackered.”

“I’ll relocate City,” Harry smiled. “And buy you wine. Chilean.” He nudged at the map.

“Don’t trust it.” Louis’ index aimed vaguely to the left as he placed out two mugs. “Chile’s in the wrong place, see? And that’s not where St. Vincent is at all.”

“The world’s the world. It’s pretty, the map.”

Louis beckoned to ask whether Harry took sugar, but he'd currently gotten hold of a Donal Duck magazine, flicking through it on Louis’ bed. It was in stark contrast to the hostile arch of his eyebrows. The set jaw. Weak lighting enfused the bed’s twill spread and the fingers resting upon it.

An anchor dappled in starlight ...

“Retro.” Harry flicked the 1973 illustration.

“Always had a soft spot for Donald.”

“Should we be jealous?”

“No.” Louis snorted, scuffing at a jolt. It was a frosted block against his little toe. “So what’s Donald doing today.” He toddled over, catching Magica De Spell peering down Scrooge’s money bin.

“In a fight with Daisy.”

“Oh, that’s a drag. They should fix it.”

Harry’s eyes zigzagged the speech balloons. “I’m sure they’ll work it out.”

He tremored too, Louis saw.

“They do.”

“You’ve read this before?”

“Yes. I know how it ends.”

“Don’t tell me.” Harry grinned. Something raw bursting through his shine. It accompanied his abyssal voice, like together they carried on deep forever. Like the universe. But that meant Harry and the universe were synonyms and that couldn’t be. It also meant Louis and caffeine needed a sought-after split. “Fisk!” he yawped suddenly, galloping for the kitchen.

“Car insurance?” Harry’s brows arched further.

Honestly, if Louis were to select the most hoodlum face in a 5-0 line-up, which he had done in a scenario in his journal, it’d be Harry’s. Smoky voice, sailor tats … eyes a motionless shade of grey like sustained by naught but a web of veins. And all though it shouldn’t remind Louis of that, it still did; of being inhabited.

“Danish vodka.” The label peeked through his fingers; an angler’s dicey stare topped with a rain hat. 30%. “We shot it. Pre-tea beverage.”

He plopped down in lotus position next to Harry on the bed, pouring bucket’s worth – or at least 150 ml. – into a pair of rhombus-patterned crystal glasses. The only crystal thingies he owned, always shielded safe in the skirted cabinet. “Isn’t it weird, though …” He marveled quietly, rising up again for no apparent reason, hovering by the sink. ”Here we are, and out there is everything we don’t know.”

“A mystery.”

“You like mysteries? Well, I guess you do. If you like the world then you like its mysteries, too.”

“Not really. I just think it’s weird to be in it.”

“Weird? Like, you’d rather not be in it?”

“We didn’t ask for this. It shouldn’t be so weird to not want to be here. People always look like you when I mention it.”

Imperceptibly, Louis willed his jaw to relax.

It didn’t work, so he dawdled with the faucet. Hot water. Cold water. Tepid. Rubber stopper. Frying pan. Froth. He didn’t know what he felt so stunned for. After all, hadn’t he known all along? Most importantly; didn’t he agree?

“I can’t really see anything if I look out. At the sky, like. I see black, you know.” Harry supplemented. It didn’t clarify a great deal.

“Like the edge of the world?”

“If that’s what black is.”

“Black is definitely the edge of the world.”

The neighbouring flat cast a coal shadow cross Louis’ right eye, his hair plunging into the dark. Still it looked bronze. He reminded Harry of someone who had lived awhile; lived with the world inside of him, and tossed it out in order to just feel light. The world might’ve been curious of Louis, had it got the chance to know him. But he couldn’t tell him that. _Too weird.  
_

"Well. 'preciate you coming over to the café, anywho. Did Niall hook you in with magnicifent tales of my brewing skills, or?"

“I did order a second serve. I'd say that's my way of complimenting a nice cup of black gold, so. Hope you enjoyed that. I’ll probably never offer that many compliments again,” Harry joked. Trying to, at least _._

"If that's you complimenting, then seriously mate, don't ever woe me! I beg you."

Harry gasped a laugh and the outburst wasn’t completely feigned _._ "Hey! I'm a number one woer, I'll have you know."

Louis’ polished tea pots in a wild shrinking violet. “Look,” he said, scouring the glossy porcelain while peeking out the window. “Everything’s white.” 

The boiler hauled a languid whistle. Harry got to his feet, Dorothy quick to claim the heated nestle. He tossed a Yorkshire tea bag into a mug of water and beckoned it for Louis, nose dewed in the steam.

And it was true. The snow was white and Louis warm.

“That is the slowest water boiler in the world.”

“Mhm." Louis clutched the beverage absentmindedly. "And look at the moon. Isn’t it major?”

“The moon?” Harry inched closer.

The snow had tucked itself into every nook of the cobblestone. Everything shrouded in white. The Lebara stand, two offies, the shingles of rented flats and empty pubs. Smoke huffed out their chimneys, thick as cotton candy, diffusing before the stars. And the moon, yes. It was almost too wide and too circular, like Louis was too silent and enraptured and too … too … And why were they peeking out the patchy window glass? Why weren’t they huddled up in blankets on the pied camping chairs on the terrace? Why wasn’t he smoking? Why wasn’t he cold? “I should head back home.”

As if on cue, Dorothy skirted for her bowl of food next to the shoe rack.

“What? Now?”

“Yeah, I have to go. I’d want to stay, though, and be … stay here. But I should head back.”

“Sure.” Louis shrugged in gesture so Harry wouldn’t feel awkward. The boy obviously didn’t have a way with oral words. _Except when he sings, probably._

“I’ll leave the mug.”

“No, bring it. I’ll come and get it back some day.” Louis placed his own at the countertop. “I’ll help you out.”

Chucking his shoes on, Harry’s eyes caught Louis’ in a sudden, searching gaze. “Is that ... fire I smell?”

“Oh. Merely the dust. It’s sort of layering the heaters. They just kicked into gear. It’ll fade soon.”

“There’re no fire detectors.” Harry’s eyes went on to roam the ceiling. “ _They_ can’t be dusted down. Gravity,” he stated as if Louis’d actually counter.

“Oh! It’s Alive!” Louis exclaimed.

“Alive.” Harry deadpanned. His hip angled against the door.

“Fine Frenzy.” Louis informed, though his left foot wobbled for balance on the right, and his neck itched a rosy colour from where the shower had prickled. “The song.”

It came through the hole in the floor.

“Right.” Harry inched open the door, taking halted movements some steps down before stilling completely. He peered up. A sinister rumble came out the pit of his throat; it both felt and looked like a laugh. “You know. I have half a mind to tickle the fuck out of you right now.”

“No, Harry, not this stairs.” A stir erupted in the well of Louis' tummy. It was so wonky and steep that he burst a guffaw at the mere thought. _Seriously, not the stairs!_ He poised for armour.

“OK. I won’t.”

Louis shook his head profusely, laugh barking louder, longer. “I don’t trust that one bit, mate!” The snap of a creak rung from a middle step, breaking the suspension. Freezing temperature still seized the hallway, and Louis’ heart beat relentlessly against it. _Bracing itself for the outdoor_ , he deduced.

Outside, cerulean snow had lodged tranquilly, urging allusion to an arcane wonderland. They both surveyed it for a moment, arms folded.

“So. Thursday.” Harry ducked. “Don’t bail.”

“No, no.” Louis gushed, and advanced to jab at his arm. He couldn’t decide the severity, and all Harry ended up feeling was a soft pluck of his sleeve. “I just decided to stay at home for New Years. Usually hang out with my mates then. I didn’t mean to bail.”

“No, I get that. I didn’t mean it like that.”

Harry smiled, fold by fold. His face felt utterly dry; teeth powerless and denuded against the rime, wishing he’d stop. He couldn’t place whether laughter kept pressing because they had chuckled at nothing in particular all evening, or of the nonsensicality itself. Airports and misplaced islands. Dorothy and Louis’ aversion to tickles. Technically, none of it had been funny. A cold loft and the eerie whisper of a water boiler. Yet something was ridiculous about it either way. Harry could tell.

These weren’t the conversations he used to have. And standing outside the rundown pub with a bowlish mug containing intensely hot tea … it wasn’t the weight he used to hold.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mumford & Sons song playing at Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meUUoNfIz6w
> 
> Texas-song streaming up to Louis' loft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA4CcfayAgs  
>    
> PHOTOSET:  
> Boy in kitchen by Brian W. Ferry - an ahmazing photographer. (https://bferry.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/railroad/) I have the photo on there to sort of illustrate Louis' doings in his kitchen.  
> *  
> Snowflakes by Yuji Obata, a Japanese who was inspired by the works of W.A. Bentley; an American photographer and farmer who got hold of a camera and microscope and photographed a single snow crystal for the first time in 1885.  
> *  
> Kitchen trinkets & glasses & whatnot by Katie Quinn Davies, added to give an idea of Louis' kitchen.  
> *  
> Cup of coffee by unknown. 
> 
> Title inspired by lyric in Bleeding Out - Imagine Dragons, remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsKCFtHsSzM
> 
> //When the hour is nigh  
> And hopelessness is sinking in  
> And the wolves all cry  
> To fill the night with hollering  
> When your eyes are red  
> And emptiness is all you know  
> With the darkness fed  
> I will be your scarecrow//


	6. Firefight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> out of the dark through a wreckaged heart

   

 

(January 7th, two days to go.)

In a backstreet in Dalston boxed shop- and apartment blocks with lush hedging and espalier trees. String lights jumbled skein above the backyard’s whizzing patio heaters, Allan Carr’s niece and hipsters alike.

Besides obvious toppling hazards à springing bench corners were also jutting flagstone and imported palm trees people kept _ow_ -ing into. A slosh of a Pina decidedly confirmed this, drying coolly in the dip of Harry’s sleeve. Bating the initial shock, it was a welcoming spruce, one where the spiller apologized profusely before weaving away into other groups.

Nor had Harry given a damn all evening that he wasn’t close friends with anyone in their group besides Ed.

Casper actually seemed quite nice. As did Chris and his girlfriend Danielle, and Ollie and Mike and Spence and Felix; all friends of Ed or acquaintances with people Harry knew. Intricate web, showbiz, and usually not as pleasant as this.

“Heineken, Harry.” A tenner flapped in front of his face, Ed’s flaming locks in backdrop.

“I’m your servant for tonight, am I?” He clutched it anyway, making headway for the outdoor bar in a zigzag motion, “And ‘til forever!” bellowing behind him.

The bartender uncapped four beers at once and accepted a lavish tip from the woman blandishing him as a large _something_ clomped down Harry's little toe which caused him stutter into the bar. Into view beamed Niall’s face, fingers clutched white to the brim of his DINK. “Fuck, mate!”

Harry’d never understand Niall’s enthusiasm of meeting up with other people, though assumed it a virtuous trait. They gave each other a solid pat on the other’s back. “Ni, how are you, mate.”

“Alright, alright. Lou’s somewhere. Dancing. Fucking wasted.” He said, a soft look of _as always_ on his face.

“Oh? You’ve been here long?”

“No, not really! Got here like … half an hour ago? Had a little get together up at Wembley beforehand. Empty stadium. Waterfall drinking games and that. Was fuckin’ packed out here when we came.”

“Ahem.” It coughed. Both the cutie’s hands were clasped on the counter.

“Oh. Two Heinekens, please,” Harry said.

“I better get back in, H. See you there?” Niall’s frame snap danced its way back in by the time Harry'd summoned a response.

“Wild night out, huh?” The barman smiled.

Harry counted his pennies. “Yeah. Sort of. Or. I dunno. Maybe. Oh, right. Forgot about the tenner.” He mumbled, a Galantis’ Runaway remix blasting through the amplifiers next to them. It sounded like all the frenzy had gone out of it, replaced with computerized plongs and pings.

“That’s alright. Half off this exact minute, actually.”

Maybe he was Swedish, sporting a tan in January.

Harry’d dated a Swede once. His spectacular abs had remained bronze all through February – lack of daylight irrelevant. Offering the flash of a grateful smile, which ended up anemic at best, Harry angled his knees for purchase as he crammed back next to Ollie to carefully balance down the glasses.

“Was that Ni I spotted?” Ed’s arm sprung for his share.

“Yeah. He and Louis’ here with some of their mates. Said they’d join us north.”

“Niall and …?”

“Louis. You know. The guy who lost his phone. The one who doesn’t like tea.”

“Oh, _Louis_ , is that his name.” Ed sipped.

A glass shattered to large pieces by their table, peppering half the palm soil. The splinter drowned in _You and I-I-I._ “Fuck,” Felix glanced down his spill. “Not making drinks out here, are they?”

“Beers only.” Harry informed.

“I’m heading in for drinks then. Anyone wanna join?”

“Shouldn’t we head on, though?” Ed inquired. “Gonna be packed in Camden less we get moving.”

“Toilets first. I’m fucking bursting,” said Spence, and he, Felix and Harry passed a throng of girls by the entrance, transfixed in heavy laughs and parley, Prince and iPhones.

 

It was one of those Scandinavian themed lounges, a pretentious pop up with tobacco company etuis anno 1939 and candles carved to fit emerald bottles of Alberobell rum. They twinkled shelfs and windowsills, casting the clientele and lambswool throws in gold. The music was different from outside; a savoury version of Ocean Drive jittered the tapers.

Sweltering, they asked for water with ice in wait of Spence. Harry spotted Ed blathering on with newfound mates beneath the awning outside. Rain loomed from all-covering clouds.

 

Back outside they were body to body with a pack of women donning matte lipstick and wedge heels, Harry flexed by the sudden pull of one of their hands.

“Hey star-crazed person.” Louis flicked his wrist to balance the hold of his ¼ cigarette. Harry extolled how smoke fought out of it still, tailing into different streams through the wool lining on his skin. “There’s a star fog in Orion, 1600 light years away, and your eyes are in it.”

“My eyes?”

“Messier 78. I googled. NASA’s telescope Spitzer is the only thing that can pierce through the cosmic dust and see it. Two green eyes.”

Louis’ sucking the butt of a cig alerted Harry’s attention to his entire face; cheeks a deep magenta from the cold. And his scarf. God, that big ass scarf. Harry had half a mind to unfree him from it, and clutched a forlorn 20 pence in his pocket extra tight to refrain.

“Louis! Mate! Niall!” A starry glow exuded out Ed’s eyes as he mushed his way to the threshold’s din. Harry didn’t imagine real stars in his eyes though. Or galaxies. No eyes had galaxies. “We’re catching cabs for Camden. You’re coming along, yeah, Lou? Ni? Harry, text Louis the address.” Ed nicked the now dead cig out of Louis’ mouth.

“Harry _never_ texts me.” Louis pouted through his grin.

“Harry!” Ed admonished. “Where are your manners?”

“No-o.” Louis dragged, patting Harry’s back in slurred circles. “You do text texts. And I love them. There’s something about their informativeness. X, x, and x. Then x. X again, x, x, x, x …”

Yet a glass razed to the flagstone. A humming feel clambered Harry’s spine. He could sense another layer of sweat down his back; midriff grilling from the 80/20 mixed pre-drinks at Ed’s. Air of January came for each person passing. The smell of steel. Of 2016.

“What’s up with all of you and freezing your balls off anyway? Sitting outside …” Louis teetered to the purchase of Niall’s shoulder. “Rather rush down a hill on a sled, truth be told. That’s what winter’s all about!”

“Oya! To Camden!” Niall came to sling his arms cross Ed’s shoulders, and they all capered abreast for the jet-black taxies idling by the curb, eyes alive with the adventure ahead.

 

Louis flung out the taxi to below the railway bridge in urgent need of a wee. The bypassing drunks blurred into fuzzy kaleidoscopes of TV snow as he released, his head bobbing absentmindedly to the song bellowing out the doors. Stan had informed that this was the pub Amy Winehouse used to attend, also, that Ed seemed ace and Ollie brilliant. In mid-utter of _Har_ -, the taxi’d screeched at red light, and clutching his seatbelt for dear life, Stan’d only procured a smile of relief.

An Uncle Fester-y sort of bouncer nodded tersely at Louis’ ID in his mount of the threshold. Inside was a wobble of sweet cherry drinks and beats that shook the counter. Louis couldn’t tell where half the pinches to his bum came from in his approach for the bar. Could be Niall. Could be Stan. Could be one of Harry’s mates. Could be a hunkytunk of an Italian with a brawn chest and toned thighs.

He brushed his palms along the bar tiles, soothed by the base's stir.

This was supposed to be a wondrous somewhere else, he’d depicted in his diary. To feel something above and beyond. It was what he was here for, after all. The reason for everything. “Are you the reason?” He slurred at the two shots he’d just englutted in a jiff. A calyx pasted in Koskenkorva backwash. He barely remember ordering it. Time sped so vivid and so languid at the same time.

A stately furnace blasted in the centre of a high brick wall, and Ed’s frantic arm waved from it, right next to a bizarre Max Ernst painting and four giggling girls, sitting tightknit on leathered upholstery.

 _Ah,_ The aloof Ed, always with the air of having heard every sad tale in the world and picked up chords rather than doom alongside them … “Upstairs!” He called, mimicking with his hands that they should all go.

“To the sky!” Louis bellowed back, jolting in a buck-and-wing up the steps for everyone’s entertainment.

He could feel it, pick up the cheer swinging his way, how they were all a union of people getting wasted out of their minds, in love and broken up, hearing the exact same music as he did, dancing to it, living with it.

 

Amplifiers physically jarred the end of the handrails. Louis let it numb his hand as he took in the scene of Niall rattling the bartender, sniggering jovially and shaking their heads. Danielle, Mike and Spence were doing the chicken dance with randoms. He did an eight-take at the perception of the fireplace eating Harry alive. Four arms, two bums. Body bowed in two from where the bar met his torso. Half-long, unconditioned hair. A haggard arm smudged with tattoos.

Louis giggled in his spurt.

For best impact, he decided to tiptoe. “You looked surprised to see me.” But the swelter off Harry’s white shirt oozed against his cheeks, and in a flick, Louis drooped against the bar, routed.

Harry’s mouth gnawed at the rim of a glass topped with red wine – an offbeat print on the otherwise ale-ish palate.

“Well, I didn’t bail, so.” Louis cocked his head. “I think I deserve a prize.”

“Prize?”

“I definitely deserve a prize. Award, if you will. A precious metal medal. Heh.” He couldn’t help but smirk. How very funny every little thing was … How mosaic the bar rack. Stunning the songs.

“Sure you haven’t had enough. There’s a strawberry hull in the corner of your mouth.”

Louis sniggered - hadn’t really paused. The strobe lights slit Harry’s face in sections of seaweed green, but his jaw pulsed unlaxed beneath it, sighing in relent. “OK, what do you want then.” He angled to let Louis in.

“Hm. Ehm. A …” He tried willing the chalkboard menu to stand still with the power of his eyes. People had superpowers occasionally, didn't they? Where else would all the ideas for superheroes in comic books come from? So why not Regulating Eyesight Extreme Superpower? “Heavy Sea’s beer?"

“’Ere ya go, doll. Yule Tide edition's the best.” The barmaid, looking as if she’d champed at the bit for a while, uncapped it in a blink. Louis clinked it against Harry’s tulip. “Thanks. You really didn’t have to, you know.”

“Rumours are you’re drunk, so. I’m keeping an eye on your intake.”

“Gosh, drunk!” Louis burst. “No, no, no. I’ve had maximum, like … maximum little to drink, seriously!”

“Maximum little to drink.”

“Oh, Harry … Mr. Baby Ringlets Parrot!” He swallowed too fast, sputtering wildly. “Mr. Baby Ringlets Parrot …” echoed softly back at him through the darkness with the singalong of Imagine Dragon's Shots, because Louis couldn’t see him now, only make out the movements of his inky silhouette. Harry’s head was shaking with glacial pace, yet it stirred his mane, locks falling down his shoulders.

In abrupt motion, he was yanked out of the frame, before Spence and Mike summoned Louis as well.

At the heart of the dancefloor were everybody else, Louis realised, as Felix squeezed his love handles from behind. The tickle caused him to laugh of glee. _Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle_ , Jason DeRulo sang, and Louis’ hips obeyed.

A girl he didn’t know, but who looked 18 and too young, grinded her way in their middle. To Harry. Louis’d continuously viewed this a lad’s night out, and it wasn’t going to get ruined this early on in the game. Or late. Whatever. He hipped her away unabashedly, contemplating apologizing to Harry (for her, not to her) but it looked like he tried disclosing something with him. Did he need the restroom?

Oh, he was _dancing_ ; snapping his fingers to the pulse with eyes closed. His narrow set of torso swung from side to side like a tardy striptease the seconds before the pants go off.

“I like your moves,” Louis shouted, and glimpsed Niall hand wrestle the barman to the point of pelleting a glass down on the hardboard - the third one broken that night. Niall’s knees pinned at the bar counter still, knuckles squished translucent and fierce.

Taken by how the scene juxtaposed the lively, lower deck of Titanic, two forceful hands replaced Felix’ hold, swaying him in wilder circles with spasmodic beats of 1-2-3, 1-2-3 ... People’s pints dribbled down their wrists as they cheered, opening up for more space. _Space for what?_

“Young & Beautiful, Great Gatsby!” the underage girl shouted, and a blithe, vintage-like melody ousted the base.

Louis’d heard this song many times before but here, now, pounding hard at his ear drums, it was so unalike itself. It’d never been just like this. Felt like this.

“… Mid July … you and I were forever wild,” Harry, as well as everyone else, bawled.

_But it’s January!_

The increase in audience would make Louis proud but he never noticed. The two spun around in a spotlight of their own, and Harry sung to him, highlighted him. _How can I ever repay_ , Louis’ mind alarmed, saddened not to have this forever.

The sound of the song went higher, the lyrics thicker, impinging on the cement squeezed between the bricks, inside the cackling fire, possibly up the chimney, all throughout the antennas, his heart, wrists, thighs … He was dancing himself silly. And how very, very drunk he’d gotten, very, very fast.

Before Louis knew it, a cigarette shoved into his mouth, the spit of Danish accent on his cheek. “Owe you,” said Felix. Memories rushed to Louis’ mind of him smoking out the taxi window. Seared flakes passing Louis’ vision in the back. It was funny how Felix looked very much like himself. Dark blonde and blue eyes, a mere centimetre shorter. So hilariously funny, in fact, that he crouched laughing, supported by Felix to step outside for the smoke.

 

"Harry," Niall'd finally found him. "Do you know _how_ happy I am we're friends? Me and Lou googled you the other day ... Did you know your swimming trunks in Brazil by a pool was _very_ yellow? And you have the voice of a 50 year old mine worker? In a good way!"

Harry laughed. "Thanks, Ni." He assumed it was Niall who made him wobble, but Niall stood eerily still. It was the room that had gone bananas, stirred like the inside of a Peek-A-Box cylinder. The venue was a mash of laughter upon laughter, bomber jacket upon cherry lipstick and cider upon shots. When he shut his eyelids close, the whole world spun in wondrous, graceful twirls, handholding Harry’s messy thoughts and manoeuvring them through the dark.

The dark where a man he was sure he should recognize full on grinded at Louis.

Where there was Louis’ back, the guy’s face, Louis’ face, Louis’ tummy who he held around, Louis’ hips who he clutched. Blue. Navy. Cobalt. White.

Kissing.

They were full on kissing.

Louis’ neck outstretched and they were kissing.

 _You’re covering Louis’ face_ , was Harry’s singular reckoning. And now his own drink was empty. At a bar with blue lights and alcohol, so. No problem. Where was the bar? There. OK.

“Bombay Sapphire, please.”

“Cat’s Eye? Quite dry. April’s Violet … Blue Moon, our specialty. Bloody Sun, where we use our excellent Kontiki Red Oran-”

“Bloody Sun’s fantastic, thanks.” He peaked.

They weren’t kissing any longer, merely talking and beckoning in to sporadically whisper, Louis’ smile puckered around the straw of his newfound Strawberry daiquiri. Harry didn’t understand – why were his cheeks still violet? The outside wasn’t cold anymore. The place is burning for god’s sake.

He swilled half the drink.

The man had vanished.

Louis stood in a web of spectral turquoise, highlighted in the shade, clearly uncertain of where to turn, of what to do exactly, until – until he glanced over at where Harry was standing, at Harry, who took a too large sip of the Bloody Sun, front teeth clashing against the glass, lower lip somehow caught in between. _Fuck’n … ouch_ …

And cutting through the scene was Niall, doing the shimmy with a brunette.

Harry filed up and out the staircase to the upper deck. He needed a breath, was all, shirt moist all through. No bar, no base. No music besides of that bellowing from the pubs peppered on the ground. A million lights bleared dewdrop in an even city surf. Blue spotlights shone up from the floor; his Bloody Sun not bloody at all.

“Harry?” Niall clutched him by the neck. “Harry, mate. You good?”

There was something poking Harry’s heartstrings, maybe one – two at most – who lightened his weight. Had Niall come out there just to check in on him? Had he even noticed him leaving? Him and Niall weren’t friends per see, but Niall really was exhaustingly festive on text. Artless. Upfront. “I talked to Ed. We’d might head for a terrace bar by Kings Cross. Can’t remember the name. If you’re up for it. Some might swing by your place, maybe? Ed mentioned something about forgetting his key at yours?”

“He did, yeah.”

“I’ll give the all-clear then. Ed tried calling for a cab and they were all taken. So we’ll just head for the bus I think.”

“Alright, let me know when we go.”

“Sure thing, mate.”

 

“So where you’re from?” Felix lit the cig chucked between Louis’ lips. The men around them smelled lux, wore tight shirts enhancing every good thing, and Louis woke to the outside patio adjacent the rails. _When did we get here?_

Pecks of grass slouched betwixt them. A fire exit staircase trailed down to the side alley siding a flower shop.

“Don ... Doncaster. Me family moved downwards when I was 15 though. Now I live on my own here. North of Hampstead. Ish.”

“Nice. ‘s Hackney for me.”

"Yeah ... Uhm ... Would you excuse me? Just need to take a piss."

Not hanging about for a reply, because Louis really, _really,_ needed a wee, he scampered down the rusty ladder. It jingled in his unsteady clasps, the metallic beat reverbrating as he ducked into a byway and released.

His throat scratched in hum of Superhero across the street … Ah, The Script. He'd used to love them. Three feet opposite stood an affiche. _DJ Tim Westwood_. “When you’ve been fighting for it all your life,” he trilled, zooming in on it with vacant eyes, “and you’ve been working every day and night.”

He zipped up and leaned deflated against the bricked walls. The click of a lighter appended the lead guitar. He figured it an automatic flick to Harry by now, prepping them cigs.

 

With it, the backdoor brayed shut for a whole seven seconds.

 

"Did you want privacy?"

“No. Just came for a wee.”

“I’ll go if you want.”

Louis bucked his shoulders against the pub, shrugging. “No.”

“What song was that from again. Which album.” Harry licked the filters.

“No Sound Without Silence.”

“The lyrics are nice. Is that what you write, too? Lyrics?”

Blackened matchbox enclosed their air. A whiff of gasoline from a taxi now and then.

“Ramblings.”

“Ramblings … Maybe I can see one day?”

“Sure.” He smiled.

“Are you lying to me?”

The music changed. Acute awareness struck Louis. He was clutching a wan cig, bearing the weight of the world on a pub wall in Camden. It was uncomfortable the way someone probed at one as unimportant as himself. He wasn’t even an author yet, trapped in a limbo of trite jobs and hectic dreams – one sphere as foolhardy as the next. “I lie all the time, I think.”

Harry’s hips wagged left to right in penguin fashion, which was hilarious because Harry wasn't drunk at all. Louis did not envision Harry in a tuxedo with an Arctic backdrop; he did not.

“Look near to fall right over, mate.”

“Just chillin’.”

“Chillin’?”

“You know you’re gonna have to accept people’s slang at some point in your life.”

“Ye, ol’ bugger! Well adapted, thanks. Oh, all those daft, gormless chuffs. We be nothin’ like those. Mufflers and cloth caps, na-ah! Not es!”

Harry’s jaw shifted. Out came laughter. Quiet titters moving with his stance - an echo of the beginning of something far afield. Louis’d been worried he was catching a cold lately, his hearing always impaired then. “Not used to northern dialect, you hypocritical bastard?”

Condensed air rushed out Harry's lips. It was funny how close it was all of the sudden, how cold it felt on Louis' own lips, his own face. _Oh._ Louis was pinning him up against the adjacent building – the needled heap of Christmassy surplus squeezed up Harry’s back. Harry hadn’t noted the turn of events either, carrying on with poor imitations of various dialects, not all British.

“Jeesh.” Louis sighed. “You get me out of it sometimes.” Disarrayed tree stands balanced red shimmering bulbs and torn corn dollies. The trees looked ripe still.

“I know. Your eyes go all lost and blue.”

“They’re always blue.”

“Sometimes they’re jade. If you look up close.” Paradoxically, Harry inched in on the spruce.

“Says you. Like what the hell kind of shade does your eyes have, it’s impossible.”

“Well, I can’t really see them myself right now, so …” Harry’s eyes rolled a big duh. He really did look right to fall.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I see, then.” Louis shoved his index right in the dip of his sternum. It felt uneven and spinning, just like the asphalt and the sky and the world. “You’re standing here in front of me, like, right in front of me … with … a black jumper and black hair and black eyebrows and black eyes.” He slurred, almost with vehemence. “And the moon's gone, though that’s because it’s cloudy I think. Or it’s new moon. But it’s black. The pavement is black. The tarmac, too, because it's on the pavement. Your pint. Your mouth. The bottom of your mouth. And your skin, too, you know. Because you’ve got black hair. So all your body hair is probably black.” The chuckles went contorted. “Yeah, I bet you’re dark. I bet you’re nice.” _Oh no._ “Not like, nice-nice, but nice as ... as a perso-”

“Think we should head back with Ed and the others.”

Louis bent his neck, wide-eyeing the sky as if for suggestion of what to do, what to say. “But this is fun, innit? I wanna stay. I don’t think anyone else wants to go!”

“Just a pit stop.” Harry gripped him steadily by the arm – had done so awhile? “At my house. Get some snacks and Ed's keys. Don’t worry, we’ll head back out again.”

Louis’ shin smacked against the door as it flung open. Niall heaved him into his hold. With no time to moan, cradling him like a baby while belting Pour Your Sugar On Me. Louis was then smacked back on the ground, the entirety of Niall’s forces aimed for the car’s door handle. "R8, man!" He said.

 

Springing into the backseat, Niall managed to knock his head into the pillar. “Fucking amazing, man, fuck, I love you guys!”

Ed jammed in the back with him to entwine their pinkies in sacred promise. “Love you too, Ni. Friends forevs, yeah?”

“Is this Ed’s car?” Louis scuffed towards it, taking they clearly knew the driver. “Where the hell did it come from?”

“Oya, mate.” A firm hand reached to shake Louis’ over the roof. “Picked it up for him. I’m Ed’s cousin. Staying with him for the week.” He sported the same flaming hair as Ed’s. Louis totally expected the car to turn turquoise and fly off to skim canopies.

“Didn’t know this kind of a world existed, I must say.” Louis said slightly bewildered, squishing his way next to Niall and strapping on his belt.

Of the pace it all was going at.

Of being led into the car.

Of having Harry’s hand goad him by the tail of his back, gravelling, “Don’t hit your head,” and, “Is Niall oblivious to pain.” Of the lights, being brighter outside than they ever had inside. January lights.

“You star struck by the non-existent VIP-sections at the venues we’ve been at?” Harry arched from the front seat.

“No-o, not just that.”

“The pristine beer you got served in the solidity of a plastic cup?” Niall suggested.

“Close, but …”

“The private chauffeur?”

“Not just that, no. No offence, Ed’s Cousin.”

“’s Ted, mate.”

“What … is this a prank?”

Harry knuckles nudged his knee to snap him back off any satirical mimicry. “What is it you’re so awed by then.”

“I’m not telling.”

“Then I’m not telling you my secret either.”

“Which concerns …”

“That maybe I didn’t know this type of world existed either.”

“Monsieur Curly Parrot,” Louis smiled affectionately, tilting his head. “Whatever world is that?”

“That’s what I’m not telling.” Harry tucked back into his seat.

No scent of white this time.

 

They pressed through a hundred other London farers. Chockful clubs twinkled in the thinning lights. The clientele ranged of all sorts; the puking ones, the gropers, the ass-balancing on iron fences. The coked up lamppost swingers. At a crossroad, Louis’ infortune left him stare at nothing but a guy tongue wrestle a girl in a pink leather skirt the texture of sausage skin.

His eyes darted for Harry’s on reflex, finding them reflected in the vanity mirror. Was he going to roll his eyes in agreed distaste of horny club-goers? Or mention they weren’t far from home? That it wasn’t really time for going out anymore, it was night, and cold, and time for soft beds? That Louis was too drunk – that he’d pay him the taxi fare home?

It had been a new smell. Like soil or coffee. Bark. A tree. Had he been running into trees in the woods filled with monsters and gotten saturated with it? Was that where he’d brought it from?

Ed squinted. “That Ferrari’s bloody annoying.”

Harry turned. “They always tailgate.”

Ted didn’t pay it attention though – turning up a song Harry’d heard before but couldn’t remember.

It had been much music lately. Lots of lyrics in his mind, depicting stories of their own that the artist probably hadn’t intended for him to spawn at all. They played out as he gazed into the headlights of passing cars - bisque eyes piercing through the thick of it. At his left stood the antiquated headstones of Gothic St. Stephens church, and he suddenly raptured in no other thoughts but the theory of past lives. Whether he’d lived one. With someone else.

 

He offered wilted biscuits (forgetting to shut the kitchen window last night during a rainshower) and leftover cod chunks dipped in heated thick gravy.

“Fucking YES!” Ed flourished celebratory up in triumph, having done a frantic dive into the couch to find his lost house keys. “Now, lads! We’ve been chasing music all night – now you all relax and I find us a song!” He shuffled through his phone’s playlist, blithely chucking his keys down his pocket.

“Chasing music?” Louis laughed at the somewhat poetic statement, though weaving it into a story within seconds. As Harry moved to turn up the volume of Fleur East's Sax, the story grew in content and length. The ending was crystal clear, the middle fuzzy, the beginning astounding and sparkly and rash.

“But we don’t reelly know what it ees,” a woman next to him spoke in thick, alcohol-tainted accent, “as my father is from thee Chez Republic, so maybe it ees from that particleer region.”

It was Niall's second hook up of the night, having arrived with a new group of people in a glitzy, royal blue Ferrari. Her toes came with a genetic muscle condition, requiring surgery by the time she reached 35.

“That’s peculiar, Ulriche!” Louis chugged half a San Miguel.  _Huh._ If he'd ever have a monkey, he'd name him San Miguel. Wasn't that the name of Ross' pet on Friends or summat? That had been a monkey-related creature, surely? Capuchin monkey. _Marcel!_

Harry were sat curled up by the farthest bow window, half darkened in the shadows of the staircase. His lips appeared fuller there, somehow, with large hands splayed around his kneecaps and eyes all apathetic, impossible to decipher the thoughts of.

Louis snapped back to the hiccups of Ulriche. “Like, music …” Her hand rested on his thigh the way you’d clutch a toilet bowl after excessively drinking. “Like what … what do you … do like … Ed’s kind? Harry’s? Mummy & Sons. No, Mumorts. You seem like a Mumfur & Sunny …” Another hiccup, “Belle & Sebastian. Defi- _hick_ -ly.”

Louis caught Harry’s eyes inspecting them, still expressionless and on a raid for something completely different. Something that didn’t even appear to be in the room. Or the house. The universe. 

 

“Ha- _hick_. Niall!” She heaved her arm impetuously, index barbed like a lightning bolt. “He adore piano! It’s sad, I theenk. Don’t you, too? Don’t you theenk piano is sad?”

 

Louis’ eyes followed the flickering of the lanterns, skirting a truckload of Absolute’s. Had it been there at their arrival about half an hour ago? No, 4 minutes – it had only been 4 minutes, he gazed astonished at the grandfather clock the fireplace. All lights off. And why the hell had Niall said he liked piano? Louis knew Niall the best, thank you very much, and not once had he cared for nor mentioned sounds uttered by a piano. Then again, why wouldn't he like piano? Why wouldn't everyone love piano?

“Louis?”

And Harry was peering at the moon.

“Sorry?”

Ulriche cast her hair to the side, a pucker ghosting her lips. Why did girls do that? “Music, Louiee, what do you like?” Cascades of hair layered down the shoulders of her navy cocktail dress as she repositioned. Louis worried whether Harry had just checked her out. Wondered. Wondered if Harry’d ever have a go at a friend’s date. Wondered how Harry was with Cas on their time alone.

“I’ve always liked the Killers. My favourite though, I’d say must be … ah, what’s her name. Shake it off.” He wiggled his bum against the sofa. “Taylor Styles! Swift, I mean. Taylor Swift.”

He watched Harry’s hipbones flex.

Like a ticking dial, their eyes locked with precise timing, cogs reeling. “I’ll find you,” Harry warned in Louis’ gallop up the staircase, feet banging across the carpet floors and seeking refuge in a room to the far right.

 

Wide double-paned windows claimed the outer wall, viewing the woodland and a skyline.

On the wall covered disarranged photos of monograms and moths. By closer inspection unraveled immaculate depictions of birds and butterflies’ autonomy. The wingspan of an eagle filled a frameless paper, the drawing drained with charcoal. Shadow elements made it appear realer than life, as if it could catapult any second and be free.

Papers stacked messily on a dark wooded nightstand – the writing speckled with stars and streetlights, enclosing something … desolate? Withdrawn?

It lay next to a ewer with a sprig in it, and an amphora of Egyptian depictions. Maroon sheets draped across a giant bed positioned in the centre.

Lonely.

It was lonely.

Familiar breathing caught up behind him. _Huh-huh-huh._ The floor-length curtains parted by only a slit but Harry strode over to clash them together fully. Louis stared. His whorls haloed in the grey glim.

Deviant.

“Quite a house.”

“Not really.”

“Yeah, definitely. Quite a house.”

Harry’s pulse points shifted silver in the slit his curtains still failed to close. Taking advantage of the interlude, Louis propped together the foam pillows bulked welcomingly in the centre of the bed, snuggling into it.

“Shouldn’t believe everything you read about celebs, you know.” Harry's leg bucked somewhat restlessly against the bedframe before angling down to sit.

It was a lithe movement, too lithe when compared with the proximity; Louis’ toe a wisp away from Harry’s splayed fingers.

“I don’t.” Louis felt his ribcage shake like threatened for life, though of course he wasn’t frightened. Harry wasn’t strong. He’d noted that at the pub, bumping into Harry by the bar like grazing the shreds of a hornet’s nest, or dog-eared journal. Written in. Read through. Spent.

“I’m never in love, you know,” Harry said impassively.

“Good for you.”

“Yeah. Good for me.”

A bubble barrelled up and down Louis’ body – maybe it was his lung capacity reassembling – and giggles spewed out like the fireworks he’d seen only days ago. He felt like an outbreak; the rose above Werthson’s porch.

“You always laugh.” Harry was leaning closer, one finger at a time, testing the grounds. Louis’ feet flung haphazardly out in response.

“Stop tickling me!”

“You asked for it.”

“I never asked for it!” He bucked over with all his might to lock legs. “Try getting away now, superstar.”

“Idiot!” But Harry couldn’t jab him off. The Christmas brew felt hot in his veins all of the sudden. Leaden. Harry beckoned his face for the sky, ending up stilling in stupefaction. _No way the snow is cold. No way it doesn’t just melt._ “Sorry.” He rose. “’s the brew.”

Louis had tracked his stare. Watched the snow fall. “It’s strong.” He quivered.

“You cold.” Harry graced the side of his thigh with his hand, though they were both in stalemate with the window - sitting on each other in silence studying frozen drench.

Something swept through Louis that moment, his back struggling to muster the strength to sit upright. On own accord, his eyes slid over to the wing of the eagle. It cut in half from the weight of his heavy eyelids. “I know why you always keep the windows up.”

A shriek sounded from the door. They startled, flitting apart like a tree struck by lightning. “There you are!”

A woman Louis swore he hadn’t seen downstairs balanced lopsidedly against the doorframe. “We’re leaving now!”

Harry shot straight for the door, cramming in past her. “You guys go down, I’ll just head for the loo.”

 

“Final boarding call … Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson,” Ed’s voice singsonged baritone from the hallway as Harry came mid-descent. By the third step, he caught Louis’ profile in the kitchen, squinting at his phone.

His shoulders were slack, and drowned in the lights from the range hood.

“Coming,” Louis replied, locking eyes with him. Then, instead of the front door, he made a sharp right. Ice-cold pads seized the strands of Harry's nape. “You’re fun,” Louis smiled. “Remember that I tell you this ... That I think that you should stay.”

“Alright,” Harry said loudly, meant for the others. “Coming.”

Though heading out the front door, they found no one standing at the gate. Wheel tracks pressed sinuous patterns to the snow. Louis’ breath swerved out in thick little cotton clouds above it.

“Did they actually leave?”

“Think so. Not sure how Niall and Ulriche left. Taxi maybe? Ed, Ted and Annette must’ve taken the other car. Ted’s girlfriend.” He added when noting Louis’ expression of misbelief.

Louis heaved in an adequate amount of air to release a guffaw high pitched enough for underground mice, crouching in a hysterical fit. Harry couldn’t help but join in. For potential outsiders it must’ve looked like they were choking, howling desperate calls for help.

“Do you want to … like …” Harry wiped a tear off his cheek, “are you very tired?”

“Early morning shift. God …” Louis outstretched, flexing his neck. “6 AM. I seriously open at 6 AM.”

“I’ll call a taxi for you.”

“No, you know what?” He repositioned in a resolute stance. “I like walking. I’ll show ’em. I’ll walk. It’s only about 20 minutes. And I’ve got my iPod with me. It’ll be me and Berlinda Carlisle, my utter most guilty pleasure.”

“ _That’s_ your guilty pleasure.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Ball Gag, we can’t all have sex fetishes.”

“Yeah, ball gags are my fetish,” Harry suspired and propped up against the doorframe. “Not bondage or subdom or actual deep throating. It’s ball gags. It came to me one night watching an episode of Taboo where a man had ended up in the A&E for not getting the inflating gag ball out of his mouth. Hey, I thought, _I_ should get that.”

“Oh my god, did you watch that too?”

“Claustrophobic as fuck!”

“Yeah, I know! Fuck! But by the way, you just admitted your preferences in bed. Mind I tweet that to the fans?”

“They were examples.”

“Really? Deep throating wouldn’t turn you on?”

“Nothing like Berlinda Carlisle would.”

"Disgrace. You’re a disgrace to womanhood. Belinda impregnates by sheer will, I tell you. Just like Shania Twain. Her love goes above and beyond petty human lust. Don’t you mix either into your dirty mind.”

“I’m not that straight, Louis. Your goddesses are safe with me.”

The thought wheel began its loop in Louis’ head. He’d wondered. Hadn’t he? “Yeah, where was Cas tonight?”

“Dunno. I broke it off some days ago.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve told you. I don’t love like that. I don’t … It was a blowjob-focused relationship for the three weeks it lasted.”

“I knew you were serious about the deep throating.”

Harry turned sideways. He appeared smaller than he had all night, but eyes wider and darker then ever, lingering at Louis’ shoes. “Well. Call me if something happens.”

“So you can wrangle with a potential assaulter of who will have me?”

“That’s my job.”

“That it is.” Louis swished around, more affected by the alcohol than first assumed, taking the first step on the jaunt back home.

 

White noise garbled Harry’s ears as he brushed his teeth and removed all layers of clothing. The air wasn’t clean yet. Something else was in it; all the other people and all the songs of the night combined.

He dropped down on the crisp sheets to release a loud breath. His chest rose and sunk with it in tidal waves. Cars passed down below. A peak of his surveillance camera out by the window came into view. _Deep throating wouldn’t turn you on?_

A screech from a halt.

Newcomers didn’t always expect the narrow slope right pass his house. He caught a whiff of his own sweat as he motioned to look out the window. He’d shower in the morning.

_Stay._

And maybe have some omelette on toast, it’d been ages since he’d had eggs. Did he have eggs at all? When did he last shop? Did Tesco hold open on Fridays? Yeah, they did. Why wouldn’t they? If not then the mushroom ragu from Gail’s would do. Or a toasted ham and cheese croissant from Starbucks.

He set the window open to fully hear the passing cars. They were a steady melody for his mind. Why don’t you buy a country estate? people had asked him at the start of his roadside buy. Or property for investments? _Stay_. Why not gated areas? Why not suburban parishes?

For this.

For wafts of fuel. For the sake of being in proximity to a pub. For the woods across the street and the way they mixed with the taste of his night caps _Stay_ and combined a sort of fancy-free existence where he listened to Foo Fighters and developed lung cancer off Prince.

It was less lonely than being lonely, and he didn’t care.

Remnants of the song from the Ted’s car played deep inside his ears. Something about the holes of an apology, a bar closing, angels never arriving. Still, it weren’t tragic depictions.

It wasn’t a bitter beat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have absolutely no clue of how a Chez Republic accent might sound in English. Sorry for my misconceptions. 
> 
> Song playing in Ted's car: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrVHivlR17w
> 
> Title based off Yellowcard - Light up the sky. It's the song playing as Louis enters Hawley's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nvMiIu7nCg
> 
> //We already know how it ends tonight  
> You run in the dark through a firefight  
> And I would explode just to save your life  
> Yeah, I would explode  
> Let me light up the sky, light it up for you  
> Let me tell you why I would die for you  
> Let me light up the sky//


	7. My Own

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "One could not die for you." The Little Prince.

 

By the sole perk of being morning alone, winter dawns winnowed any remnants of scuzzy nights away. The pavements shimmered litter-free. Oxygen thrusted the air. Perhaps was it a northern quality. Northern London, Northern Norfolk.

Quivering his way through the hoarfrost, Harry’s vision fleeted off to the shipyards at Hemsby. It had been his location of work for six years before busking his way down to London. He'd resided in a garage in a wooded area close to the city centre – he chuckled at the term; Norfolk, a _city_ – with the perpetual tang of bark and tobacco. Opposed the gravel road trickled a lake, and each morning he'd chucked a chair to the threshold, slurping his Tesco Everyday Value coffee to the sanguine concoction of woodland.

 

By present-day contrast, Ed and Niall’s jaw chattered with tremors, hands tucked to the well of their pockets. Thick plumes swerved from each their breath past a timeworn trough up the interstice of decades old shingles.

“I thought you'd gone in already.” Harry sped up, sensing it highly conceivable that the inside of his forehead physically richocheted. Too many drinks last night. _Why this incessant urge for mini-umbrellas_ , he muddled, ears pounding from the smothering leaves beneath his soles. September and January were months that smelled of flu, in Harry’s book. Everything crystallized, if only for a moment, before the illness obscured. And so he couldn’t shake the roiled feeling in his thighs as he braved towards the two.

“Well. Said you wouldn’t be long.” Niall tried admonishingly, but his chin rose rubicund and charged for tea.

“Was I?”

“You’re quite lost on time, babes.” Ed pat an empathic palm to his neck as they took on the threshold.

Cramped groups of seating peppered throughout. Fruity lures of cider and ales and holly snared them already by the menu shelf abreast the door.

A last free table sided the patio door for the beer garden. Arranging around it, they found people bunched outside as well, flocking six heaters like moths to flame.

“Excuse McMillan,” a middle-aged woman offered in Harry's jammed effort. Her English setter’s nose set to nuzzle Harry’s shin with slobber. The woman was companied by two men, nodding hello’s between a slurp of tea and munching of apricot tarts. All were clad in wellies and frocks. An additional emerald Burberry scarf enclosed the lady’s neck.

“That’s alright. Hey McMillan,” Harry pat the dog’s head. It seemed to calm her, or him, down, eyes falling shut in the wee embrace.

Niall deflated into a cuffed leather seat opposite, dabbing circles of fatigue out his eyes. “Fuck, am I the only one knackered from last night?” 

“I don’t feel too bad. I reckon Harry don’t either. Oh, hot cocoa for us all, love.” Ed said apace. The barista's smile feigned a harmonious greet but her fingers flicked frantic whips to her notepad, a daub of sweat on her collarbone. “Alright. Small moment's wait!”

Comfortably numb to any hubbub, Harry's focus slid docile onto the foggy film sheening the windows. His pupils shrunk to microscopic spheres in the stalemate. The panes paralelled a coat of sea ice, streaks of cerulean needlefish flitting just beneath the ice.

Frost whizzed past their ears.

“Lou!” Niall cheered.

Not visibly shy in preempting their attention, the door fell shut behind Louis' back, casting a last squall on the unwrapping of his maroon scarf. “Fellow men." His brows bunched up as he disembroiled the final loop. "I suggest we head out for the pigeons afterwards! They’ve got babies now. All over the place!”

Harry woke to the oddest sense of amnesia.

Louis’ skin seemed new. The tendons of his throat a steel grey. Cheeks kind of … alive. Bedimmed with harsh stubs. Someone sure didn’t get hangovers. Someone actually fed off staying up all night. He looked at Harry like he was new too, though in a different way. Harry felt like crap; one that could smell its own stale breath.

“Don’t you mean the ducks.”

“As if no pigeons appear there ever, be real Haz, please.” In a dart, he was over at the bar for order, voice shrilling across the room and back to their table. “Heya, babes! Earl Grey, if you have? And a dash of milk? Lovely, babes.”

Harry had chosen not to pay attention to the tiring snapchats from Louis and Niall through the morning and midday – at least four were Louis nicking coffee at work and have it scorch his tongue each time, spritzing it out his mouth and apologizing to incoming customers, whispering penetrating _bye-bye!_ ’s terribly close to the speaker.

He was surprised he’d made it to Hampstead without the hounding of police combating employee theft. And ENT doctors.

“Ruddy cold out, isn’t it?” Louis trotted carefully so not to spill his earthenware-contained beverage. “While I was the perfect temperature last night. Toasty. Weird for January.”

“I don’t get the weather.” Niall said. “Today is fucking freezing.”

“I know, can't feel my balls! Thanks by the way.” Louis repositioned his bum in several jounces before content with his position, eyes set on Harry’s.

“Hm?”

“The dancing … the drinks. You know.”

“Oh. Yeah. No worries. It was you and Niall who asked me out originally, so. Only nice to join forces.” He mimicked a motion of zipping his fingers together, catching Ed choke a giggle at McMillan; his or her tail whacking the floorboards in glee.

Harry’d always been a cat person.

“Oh! Lou! I’ve found some newer information on the treasure chest ... You might’ve been right-”

 

With that, their conversations branched into different directions, Ed philosophic and complacent in the musings of top places to tour.

 

“Brazil on second. Or third ... Haz? Sydney tops, no debating.”

Niall inched over at the question, leaving a solitary Louis by the end of the table. His forehead furrowed over a geneology article; letters close to be mirrored on his face.

“Brazil, hands down. Trust me. Best women.”

“Not gonna argue, mate.” Ed said.

“Denmark.”

Niall raised his palms in appeasement at Harry's remark. “Don’t mind if I do.”

“No, like. For the views.”

“The views?” Ed croaked around the rim of his mug.

“Sort of flat, innit?” Louis said, eyes flicking over at Harry before returning to his article. He was nibbling his lip in stern contemplation, face dynamic and crinkled like sweeps of a laid-in bed sheet, then smoothed out with a repositioned whisk.

“Mons Kliff, it’s called. It’s this ... This cliff, yeah. In Denmark.” Harry felt their zing peter out – everybody’s attention on him.

“Nothing like those at Hoy in good ol' Scotland, I bet." Ed rattled the cup with his spoon, catching nothing but air. "Not to be presumptious but mum's entire sub stems from there, so. I've seen the pictures." He sat it aside. "Anyway, are people up for Inner City, then?”

“Better get going in not too long,” Niall said, “got a 5 to 9 shift. Idiotic set up.”

 

Passing a music school, chinkle of tangents billowed through the crack in a window. A children's choir clambered through undeveloped vocals.

Harry beckoned to locate the window - he'd no idea Hampstead offered a music school or whether there actually _was_ a music school - simultaniously clocking all the people for brunch that Friday, as well as the bow of Louis' rounded eyebrows. In the silvery daylight, his eyes were cobalt in the curbs, striking up silent conversations with each passing family, group of friends, joggers, with everyone they met. With everything they saw. Something about him negated the scenery, though, as if it didn't go par with the month, or London. A restless itch in the way his lids flickered. 

"So how was the latter part of last night, then. Got home OK?"

"Hm?" Louis bolted to his side in three supple hops. He smelled of copper kettles. "Was that for me?"

_Of April._

Harry ducked his chin, chuckling. He decided to try and speak up on a more frequent basis so not to give the impression of taking on conversations with boskets and palisades. "Uhm. Yeah."

“Well, I had loads of fun. It's easy with your group, you're all ... You know. You’re easy talking to.”

From afar, it might've looked like they were fighting and Louis had shunned, shrunk in a nest of stonewashed denim and hairspray next to a full-grown adult. Harry hunched, leveling Louis' beanie, screwed to the view of a laden mailbox. “Yeah, you too.”

“… And of course now I jinxed it,” Louis sniggered, alluding to the silence that emerged, “now that we don’t know what to say to each other.”

“It’s typical, isn’t it. It’s like the mind just stops.”

“Like, _nothing_ interesting pops up. And you either walk in silence, which is awkward, or you bring up the weather – which is such a giveaway of not having anything to say.”

“For me silence isn’t awkward.”

“Good.” Louis smiled, eyes on Niall and Ed’s heels, and when Harry didn’t say anything back … “Did we just jinx it again?”

Harry’s hair looped backwards in a cascade. It was a soft guffaw. A soft mane. “Maybe we’ll have nothing left to say to each other because you keep jinxing it. I’m honestly a bit taken away by the way you look, though.”

“Oh. Are you the type to fish for compliments?”

“What?”

“You look effortlessly fit and I look like I showered in a sewage. So now you’re trying to give me compliments because you want some of your own.”

“Fuck’s sake.” Harry grunted. Though he was smiling, still; Louis saw the velvety print of a dimple.

“You’re a _star_. They’re sometimes like that. Remember, I don’t know you.”

“Idiot.”

“I’m serious!”

“I know, and you’re an idiot. You also know it doesn’t look like you showered in a sewage. So seems to me you’re the one fishing for compliments.”

“Seems to me you’re a downright liar. Look me in the eyes, Harry Flack,” he grabbed the arm of his fawn lambskin coat, “and tell me I shine more than the sun on the brightest, most beautiful summer’s day.”

“God. Why would I say you shine more than the sun and what it'd ever do on the brightest, most blending summer’s d-”  
Incoming his cheek was the sideswiping of Niall's denim jacket. Unpleasantly so.

“Bus.” Ed thumbed at the red double decker beside them.

“Southwark then? Hit the market?” Harry broached as they queued to beep their Oysters. The engine rumbled into gear through the latter of his sentence. He tried to keep the conversation going. Didn’t really want the silence just today.

“I love markets!” Louis responded. It was a curious and light, and if weighed, it would probably be ethereal and featherlike letters.

But you can’t weigh letters.

_Stop thinking about weighing letters._

"Sure. Love me some Borough Market. Never been, believe it or not!" Niall added.

"Ah, yeah, I haven't been there in a while," Ed said, peeking out the window.

Wreaths and corn dollies still ogled from the shop fronts; a leprechaun-shaped tintinnabulum jingled from the driver’s booth, snatching up the best view. The entire allé down to Euston reigned with Christmas garlands, before vanishing out of sight by the end of Eversholt Street.

 

At Borough Market, glazed cobblestone urged ginger orientation, and Ed deployed them through the jam of tourists and fellow Londoners before a wiry set of eyebrows. Amidst plying tradesmen in every culinary branch imaginable, dominated the face of an ovate, brisque man. His feet stood portly by a succulent booth with Turkish delights.

“Kahvesi for you!” His arms flapped, frightening a bypassing family, “Kahvesi is what you need! So cold, this day!”

Niall’s face imploded sun-like, cantering sideway to dodge the crowd in feat of being first in line to shake his beefy hand. “Niall! Niall Horan!”

It was Niall’s dream, Louis knew, to travel the globe in venture of eating and drinking his way through the cultures. Istanbul'd been on that list for ages.

"Aye! Jonathan!" Half a missing set of teeth jutted out the vendor's gap. His otherwise bald head had clobs of strands on it, glistening few and far between.

“Was a bartender in Alanya while I holidayed last year.” Ed parcelled out their ready-made coffee. “Excellent lad. Great night life, too. And by the ocean side is an old fort where you can go for a swim at night. There was this cute little sea lion, mate. You’d have loved it. Turtles too. Major.”

“So this is kahvesi?” Louis snuffed the rim, unperturbed. He dared a sip. “Intense.”

“Something about the way they grind it or summat.”

"No way!" Niall gawped. "Chocolatier Beatrice's Couverture Temptations & Rosy's Candied Fruits!"

"Now that's an easy slogan to produ-"

Niall cut him off, gamboling off to the puny delicacy.

"Well, cheers," Ed rose his cup as thank you, Jonathan only grinning wider, watching them meander after Niall.

 

Floorboards mottled with cocoa spills inside the shop. Warped pleasure noises came from somewhere down the only isle.

“St. Vincent. Best chocolate in the world. Smell.” Niall's head of hair emerged in a jumble of foreign chocolate. He barely held it up for them, a linger of dark basement and salt breezing past their nostrils.

“You take your time, Ni, we’ll head out for less intense coffee, I reckon.”

"Catch you guys later." He plucked out a tasting sample, too lost for further chitchat.

 

They jammed the acrid dregs of their kaveshi in a dustbin by the row of brick buildings opposite the fair, save for Harry, growing to like kaveshi's offer of numbing acerbity.

 

 _Monmouth,_ read a tin sign to their left, directly beneath the railway. Unlike the others, its bricks were emerald and lustrous.

Inside teemed a different atmosphere compared with Becks. Hotter. Russet string lights snaked the counters, and copper coloured art hung on the walls by local artists trying to make the extra quid.

The venue had a darkened glow to it; soothing against the translucent outdoors. A song trilled baritone from further in, awakening Harry's memories of sitting on a shrivelled sofa in his dad's Yorkshire den, watching Disney's original Chip'n Dale film. White picket fences, mosaic woodland ... chipmunks flapping open an umbrella and flying off before an encompassing rainbow. It was naive enough to curb his childlike fantasy at the time, yet realistic enough to represent his wistful yearning out of there. 

It clouded away in a swirl of macchiato steam and hot milk, enveloping them already in the back of the queue.

“We’re having coffee, not quickies. Where are people’s manners,” Louis huffed, unable to see past the barista's inappropriate amount of eye contact with Harry even through the fog.

“You can have her.” Harry fetched forth a handful of bills. "Why don't you two hog us a spot and I'll get us the drinks. What're you having?"

A selection of Catalonian brewed pale ales shone invitingly from a polished beverage refigerator. And Louis felt done with coffee for now. "That babe right there."

"Make that two," Ed grinned, and they were off to snag a just opened spot by the large window with view of the market.

 

Harry placed the beers, who clinked a muffled sound when placed on the scuffed table.

"Torrential!" Niall flung in, squawking already from the threshold. "Hot cocoa, please! 's much cream as you deem right for the situation!" It didn't look angled for anyone in particular from where he located the guys, wrenching out his jacket and joined them - yet a barista took on the task immediately.

Rain had broken from the sky; Louis caught the last modest droplets blanketing the ground before they followed up with a bombardment at the double panes. But their impact was subdued, shielded off.

"Rather be in Turkey, truth be told." Niall put down his phone, opening a playlist loud enough only for them to hear. A brimming mug of hot cocoa was placed by it. "Oh, wow, talk about service!" He beamed up at the barista, who only reddened, smiled, and set off back for the till. "And look," Niall awed, "swivels in me cream. Nothin' like it. No bashing but the pub earlier didn't have half of this!"

He set to chug half of it down, treating the scolding of his tongue like the presence of a feeble, far-off fly.

"Once upon a time I could read tea leaves but I can't remember how," Louis said. “But I _can_ read clotted cream, and this exact cream depicts a country never before seen, Ni. Lucky, is what it you are.”

“No way.” Though tone always flat, Harry's mocking was of a decidedly more deadpanned nature.

“Behold!" Louis' lips lined in a sigh as he straightened out a bunch of wrinkled papers off his pocket. "It is the land of the Cemmurians. Alive after all!”

“Lou, you do talk some shit.” Niall chuckled, tongue swiping to catch the stroke of his chocolate handlebar moustache.

Louis puckered his lips slyly, uncapping a pen he'd nabbed from somewhere Harry hadn't even clocked. "Guilty."

A hobo had come in the door after Niall, spindly hair all soused from the downpour. His bitty, blue shopping cart filled to the brim with Fanta, and his grin angled left, right and centre as he came to a halt before Louis. Harry observed the encounter.

“Too late for Christmas cards now, boy!”

“Better late than never!” Louis lilted, squinting his eyes genially at him for the briefest of moments before restoring to his papers. The elder chuckled, grin now contorting his face like a sere map of the underground.

 

Maybe everybody loved Louis.

 

Harry took a long, hard glance at his bowed frame.

He was arrowing bubbles together, one line crossing so hard the paper gave in. Harry’d never noticed; the sleeves of his jumper had holes in them. His scruff was harsh down his jaw, as if shelter for delicate skin. Then he looked up.

It caught Harry by such surprise that he ran through thousands, or at least five, scenarios in his head as to what to do. Dodging would practically profess being an ogler.

He opted for a monochrome photo on a column of two boys next to a man selling roasted almonds. _At the fair in Macclesfield, sugarcane in hand, I captured a second of Mr. Boon and two boys who far off ran,_ stood in slant handwriting beneath, part of a longer verse.

“Did you know,” Louis spun the pen between his middle and index finger. It startled Harry further. “ … That every once in a while, it looks like your eyes are ‘bout to pop out of your head?”

Harry tried to casually relax his forehead. He knew that that was the part of him that often looked most tense.

“Yeah, they’re not actually popping out,” Louis quirked, “but would you tell me if I had like a dimple imploding out of my eyelid or something? Or a really uneven stubble? The mornings are hectic in my household, defrosting the water kettle, a hungry cat, an either scolding or Siberian stream of water in the shower … I can’t always be perfect.”

“Yes, I’d … I’d tell you.”

It wasn’t that Harry was frightened by Louis. It’s just that Louis analysed things on the go, a seemingly instinctual habit, and no words nor thoughts went unnoticed.

All in all, he was the least romantic person Harry had ever met. Even less so than himself. And Harry was a flirtatious and easy going, somewhat bored man – who had never cared for twosomes, or the island chocolate smudge Niall so fancied. The fact that Louis even had a girlfriend baffled him. First of all, how was the sex? Just how mechanical did it get? How on earth did he sound while coming? How automatic were his thrusts? How bad was the foreplay? How unclassy was his use of tongue? How skinny were his bones? How fast did he co …

“Mate, you’re gonna rip that.” Ed leaned over to gently separate Harry’s hand from where it pulled the neckline.

“Maybe drink your muddy sandpaper, love,” Louis smiled softly, “and I’ll be done here in just a few and we can go on, yeah?”

“Muddy sandpaper!” Ed snorted and flipped to an Africa By Steam Trains travel guide found amidst the stack of reading material on the granite windowsill.

“Muddy sandpaper?” Harry turned to Ed, perplexed.

“Ah, brill! What’s the plan?” Niall blared, chugging the dregs of his cup as if water. “Getting quite hungry, actually.”

“Same,” Ed agreed. “Louis, can you cook?”

“Hah!” Niall snorted.

“Actually, I’ll have you know I make a wicked chocolate pudding and homemade cream and a wicked roast with potato mash and caramelized onion gravy.”

Niall coughed. “Louis, mate, the lasagne?”

“Feisty oven, Ni, what can I say?” Though joshing, Louis recalled the night with horror. It was Niall's first time at his place. With great unfortune, the introductory lasagne had, once digested, ended up in the pipes of Louis’ shower after already clogging the sink. Realising how not even an Irish specimen could stomach it, Louis had tossed it away and blamed the kitchen equipment. It was half-true; the Cascade dishwasher being 12 years old.

“There’s that acoustic thing at your pub, though, Lou, innit?” Ed squinted sagely. “I’ll definitely drop by, just have that gig in Whitechapel first. Pretty soon actually.”

“White Hart?” Harry asked.

“Treasury.”

“You’re the _boringest_ of people,” Louis moaned, “what am I supposed to do for the rest of the day?”

“You can cook for Harry. Though two people dying of food poisoning offer little help. Maybe take turns eating.”

That elicited a light smack in the head from Louis. “There will be no cooking, as that’s more of a date-thing if there’s only gonna be us two, right Haz? But I’m open for other suggestions.”

“Are drinks ungay enough for you, then?”

“Wha … nothing wrong with being _gay_ ,” he splayed his palm out on his chest, affronted. “I was simply saying. In terms of dating.”

“I think we know we’re not dating.”

“Obviously.”

“Yeah.”

“Ye-”

“Guys?”

 _What,_ Louis arched his neck demonstratively backwards, eyes screwed to the vaulted ceiling.

"Going to the burger bar by the pretzel stand. Let's meet up in, like, 15 minutes, yeah? By the berry shop?" Ed and Niall had, at some point, reached the entrance.

"Excellent suggestion!" Louis called. "I can only hope an intestine eating bacteria hasn't survived the cookery skills of the burger vendor! You wouldn't deserve it one bit, loves!"

"We'll be careful to check if the surname is Tomlinson, you're right," Niall cackled, and gambolled out the door before Louis could lob his pen at them.

 

“Then there were two.” Harry said in the void of intermission.

“I know. If only I was here with a celebrity, though. Might enliven the mood. Do you know any?”

“Funny.” Harry took down the final dregs of his coffee pursuit, strangely at ease with the way their banter sometimes ended up with Louis joshing Harry’s public persona and rarely addressing things of personal nature. Like whether Harry had siblings. Where he was from. What he'd done his entire life before this. He caught a marker about to leap out of Louis’ chest pocket. And it was true, he realised. Louis’ chest was narrower. “What’re your dreams in life, Lou?”

He tried it casually. _Lou._ It was how all the others said it, but it had sounded differently on their tongue. It didn't sit well with Harry. _Lou. Louis._ Louis didn't seem to have registered the endeavour.

“My dreams? Like, goals?”

“Yeah. Or do you want to be like everybody else?” Harry nudged in general directions. At a man outside the window feasting in Belgian cheese and bratwursts.

“There’s nothing wrong with being ‘everybody else’ as you term the mortals.”

“I could’ve said the same to one of them, pointing back at us.”

“Everyone’s special.”

“That’s what I’m saying. So what are your dreams.”

“Writing. Which is what most people would say.” Louis shrugged and centred his thoughts on the algific waft funnelling out his bottle. Everyone wanted to write. Everyone wanted to make it big. Everyone wrote better.

“Not many people write.”

“Tons do. Dead end race,” he shrugged again. Had been fixed in that position for a minute really. He exhaled a breath and slackened. “I want to win stuff. Not for the awards but for the fun. I want to have bestsellers and write. Live off it.”

“Not many people write.”

“Harry … Stop saying that.”

“Not many people write.”

Louis giggled and angled at him.

“People dream of writing and of perfecting their skills. But very few sit down to write everyday. Or study the marketing that goes with publishing. Very few go to literary events to make connections and hand out business cards. Very few make it an own business at all. What many do, is sit at cafes for hours with a pen and paper, writing nothing. Or they write only when they’re inspired. They romanticize writing and expect to be discovered. They don’t get that it’s a business and that you need to strategize.”

"It's hard, though. Writing really is hard."

"Yeah, but don't you ever have, like ... something that resonnates with only you. Stories only you envision and elaborate on, something that's only yours."

“There's sort of a song I hear when I’m with other people. It's especially in crowds or concerts or at work. Like a centre somewhere that I’m always in. Or always tuned in on.”

"Jot it down and give it to me. We'll make it a song. Don't worry, you'll get your cut."

“Hah, well, listen to yourself! I wish I could take it as lightly. Wish I could be more like you.”

“Why on earth would you want that.”

“What’s so bad with being you?”

“I’m just born wrong. And my dreams are too big.” Harry's gaze fell to a man weighing wild cherries.

In profile, Louis noted his eyeballs appear lacklustre. A dull observatory of things more alive. _Jeez_. He felt tipsy – unsure if the base lay in Spanish brews or Harry’s face. Probably the former; alcohol did funny things to Louis, as it turned out. And he who’d been so stalwart mere weeks ago.

Out the awning fell the drizzle laggard, as if tarry.

“Have you noticed we’re always together when it’s sort of muggy?” he asked, mind wandering to real tar and tar workers and unbearable conditions and 17th century London. Supposedly the draining system was so poor, shit spate the streets all summer. Condensed heat for up to 38 degrees Celsius. No hygiene.

Harry’s smile clenched around the tip before releasing with the tiniest of pops, carbonated droplets spilled to his lips. “What?”

“Damp, like. Always these rainy, wet, foggy, darkened places.”

“We’re always cold to the bone, too.”

“We’re like a living doom and gloom.”

“I feel parts of it is my fault.”

“You blame yourself for the weather?”

Harry shrugged.

“Are you ... Do you feel happy?”

“Am I happy … I am not happy, no. Are you?”

“You know, as much as it obviously means everything to you, I don’t believe in romance.”

“Romance?”

“You romanticize this hollow existence of yours. I’ve seen the artwork you’ve got up on the walls. Drawings of swallows and dead end fields … Not to mention the one of a skeleton having pie, mate, what’s up with that …”

“You don’t get it.”

“So you can be a romantic romantic, but I can’t be a romantic writer, romanticizing romantic writing?”

“Gosh … We need whiskey for this?”

“Question mark! It has returned!” Louis snapped out his arms. It startled a family group by their side, elbows subtly arcing their beverage for protection.

“God … ”

“Anywho. I’d love me some Tennessee but I really should head back. Pub’s waiting for me. Setting up the gig and stuff. Swooning the lads and ladies.”

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah, true. The gig.”

They gathered up their gear, braced for the pelleting downfall.

“It’s not a lie, no.”

“Idiot …”

“Is that all I am to you?” Louis stepped out the entrance, flipping his hair in such a flawless manner that it was nothing but suspicious. “All beauty, no brains?”

The rain battered before him like the backdrop of a film, and used to Harry’s lag whenever a response was required, Louis got on to helix his scarf in four bounteous whorls. Protection was of essence. He was more scarf than jacket, really. More so than skin and bones, even. “They start 8-ish.” He said factually, fastening the coil. “There’s a band covering The Killers. I hope they play Mr. Brightside.”

A mare’s tail of Marlboro skid through Louis' lashes then, and turning, he found Harry puff a cigarette on the QT beneath a No Smoking sign. Surges of people streamed in and out of the entrance right next to him. Louis doubted anyone took note of the petty crime. “I bet you do.” Harry showcased with a bizarre grin.

Which was funny. And obscene.

“If I had a mirror, you’d know why I’m cackling.” Louis elucidated, erupting with laughter before the hoary railways, the dwindling crowds. Certain booths were stowing up their kits, joined with a taciturn dusk betokening the end of a long workday. The garland lights started to outshine the day. “Fuck, my hands are so cold. Feel.” Louis urged them out for Harry to touch, but it was just him, standing alone.

“Here!” Harry’s voice lingered somewhere in the luminous air amidst the railway colonnade.

The tourist buses, the taxi wheels, the boxes filled with greenery … it appeared so untouched. Like Harry’s words sieved through and changed it.

It made Louis think of flower petals, and how they could possibly survive the market’s buzz. Oily pads grappling at them for touch. Air rimy. Foliages seared from polar nights. And the noises everything gave off, so loud and frantic, almost too strident to bear.

He had to move on; to motion. He hied for Harry, who was exchanging pennies for the purchase of a card from a flower stand.

“This shop has literally everything,” he said wide-eyed, torso siding two pink rosebuds about to unfold, looking the most consumed Louis’d ever seen him.

“Everything?” He contested and glanced about. “Well, where are the … the daffodils, then? Daffodils is where it’s at!” He did an elaborate horn sign.

“Do you know how you look like when you do that.”

“If you say ridiculous, I’mma send my pimp on you!”

Harry clutched his left shoulder. It was smaller than his entire palm. “Dainty.”

“That’s worse than ridiculous!”

A squeeze.

“Standing by the lilies, pimp on speed dial.”

Louis' sensed his cheeks going red with the tweaks. “I'd rather take the unseasonal strawberries from the stand over there.” And it was true; the urge was real.

“Ickly Louis-nouis wants strawberries? Strawberries he’ll get.”

“Are you gonna be like this all day?”

“Like what Louis-kins?”

“Fuck’s sake.”

He bucked up against the metal structure. The beer felt icy in his hand, which - _oh_ \- they'd mindlessly brought the beers out with them, Harry's mouth enclosing Ed's bottle. It was colder than their tip toes, and maybe a strange pick of outdoor beverage.

“Anyway." Louis ducked. "I really have to get going. For real."

"For reals, yo."

"Harry, stop," Louis sputtered in delight. The brass buttons of his jacked scraped against the metal as he dispatched, mirroring off its gold.

Stare not budging away from it, Harry dodged Louis' face by inches in a catapulting dive before being boosted back to his original position. “We keep bumping into each other,” Niall laughed. Harry didn’t really consider it a bilateral avocation but fine. “FYI, solid figure, mate! But here, grab some. Ed got us lollipops!”

"Free pops for the purchase of only one pizza slice." Ed came meandering behind Niall. "So what've you guys been up to?"

"Oh, eh - _everything_?" Louis puffed his chest out. "Well, first off ... Monmouth was superb. Which you know, so ... The flower stand!" Harry's left eyelid quailed at the pitch. "Wonderful flowers. Harry picked out great post cards, skylines of a nightlit London. And ... The berry fruit stand thing, the one there." He pointed. "Cherry's like you wouldn't believe. Other than that, I can't say I really quite remember. Easy to get lost in the line of all these marvellous shops, aye?” He bumped shoulders with Harry, who’d gone strangely placid.

"Not really."

“Hah, well. Just me then! Anywho.” Louis exhaled a sparse puff of air, left foot kicking at the juts of a manhole cover. “You’ll have to suck your lollies without my presence. Gotta prep for tonight.”

Niall crunched through a piece. “I’ll be there by 9.30 at the latest! Fuck my job, honestly. Would wanna get there sooner, but.”

“And I whenever the gig’s done!” Ed thumbed up.

"Can't wait!" Louis waved in a sprint, the turn signal of the 214 bus flashing into Southwark Bridge Road.

 

*

 

       

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Møns Klint is Denmark's highest cliff. Picturesque.
> 
> Besides the Macclesfield photo and the refrigerator in Monmouth, most depictions are from real life. As with any historical mentions. 
> 
>  
> 
> Title based on lyric by Heart - Alone, live version. I am hopelessly imagining HL to cheesy lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W52PP3lYlUs
> 
> //You don't know how long I have wanted  
> To touch your lips and hold you tight, oh  
> You don't know how long I have waited  
> And I was going to tell you tonight  
> But the secret is still my own  
> And my love for you is still unknown//


	8. Flew And Flied

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

Ed let a handful of differently sized coins cascade into the chauffeur’s palm (Harry’d never gotten his country’s love of currency shapes and fragments thereof) before they tiptoed off on the cobbles' grimy ice.

Rapping a knuckle to the door, nothing but a far-flung beat answered. Harry opened.

Inside a cobalt double door existed a narrow, bricked passageway. Fairy lights speckled its ceiling in a patchwork of veins, escorting their path onto a square courtyard.

It was nothing like imagined.

Snowflakes whorled down a quadrate slot of ashen sky, _puffpuffpuff,_ while the rumble off a synth throbbed Harry’s legs without even being inside the pub. A crowd stood by the outside table. Their sleeves ruffled with arm gestures of impelling stories; a florid patio heater being their main shield. Their natter was approachable and tame, like part of a miniature bazaar with all the lit torches and jutting masonry. 

In the corner opposite, four musicians tinkered with a fusion drum kit and a woodwind flute.

Two girls filed out the pub door and down a wonky three-step stairs, fetching Marlboro out their studded leather jackets. A silver hip flask peaked palpably up Niall's chest pocket from where he traipsed out behind.

 

“Matey-os! Getting fucking slizzered! Not all venues allow drinks outside, you know? Fucking shite! But you _can_ bring drinks outside here!" He accepted a cigarette from one of the girls in inebriated motion. "Anyway. Texted Adriana. The brunette, you know, for beers. Hot bird, that. Gonna join me tomorrow for a brewery stint in Hoxton. Promising, yeah?”

"Good on ya!" Ed bumped shoulders, to which Niall miraculously didn't budge, but drooped closer, nibbling at the fag like indulging a fat cigar.

“Budge, budge! Coming through!" The door flung up  once more. They flocked to the cobblestone. "Thank you!” A tray of jazzy drinks rested on Louis' wrists as he marched his way to the bench crowd.

A hushed murmur droned into a mike, then. The pluck of a guitar. Two voices.

 

The softness of it shook Harry's brain neurons into chaos. A blooming anxiety contemplated the world yanking to a complete halt. Hence the degrees of the world's axis would hitch entirely, seas most definitely flooding.

The cobbles had weathered the Great Fire of 1666, though. _Sturdy grounds_. This was one of the oldest areas in London, he'd found on his Cloack  & Dagger google search the day before. The neighbourhood and clientele had, however, all died of smoke inhalation that fatal, twilit night (2nd of September, Harry'd crow if anyone ask for particulars).

 

The chords now quietened the crowd like a lullaby. Louis' hair revealed blowzy and rushed beneath the heater's glow as the gathered glasses- the skin on his arms a shifting, rosy gold. Not one for love songs, this was the least cheesy cover Harry’d ever heard of My Heart Will Go On. The edge was taken off the cold, the scent of Niall's cig doing that thing where it urged oxygen to his heart rather than clogging up vessels.

The world swivelled.

Oceans kept.

He’d used to write songs in moods like this.

The snowfall tottered by the singer's breath as he took on Vance Joy’s Georgia. Ed revelled in it, Harry saw, where he stood with his back rested to the wall abreast newfound friends. And Harry wasn't obtuse - he, too, picked up the ambience, and lit a fag in belated allegiance with Niall. Inhaling it, a surge of cold air flung up his back.

The press of a hand to his waist.

Beckoning, he saw Louis hug the tower of empty glasses to his bicep up the stoop. He was smiling at him, coming to nought in the throng inside and a different beat.

 

It wasn't long until Niall steered their group inside.

Five backpacking Germans came clomping down next to them. The fire off two fireplaces cast a radiant burgundy round their woodwork table, and nightlights lit the rough-and-ready elevation of a stage on the backyard patio.

It must be where the headliner would be.

Harry fidgeted. The blaze off the furnace came like a hundreds pins, yet the panes by his neck crisped at its edges. Trapped by the heat inside and January out. And the drums from the sound check ... so unduly ear popping. People’s nattering had turned into cackles and brawls. It hurt. Everything.

Everything suddenly hurt so bad.

_Today._

A familiar tune prickled his ears. Reasons Unknown.

The Germans meandered out to the band, and Ed and Harry rose to snag an overviewing spot by the terrace doors. An attentive awareness unfurled through the din. Even the ruckus from the very back whisted to immerse in the lead singer’s aggregation through the chorus, the bucolic timbre of the guitar, and just this once, after so many months – _years_ – Harry allowed his mind to sing along.

 

"… And we said if destiny’s kind, I’ve got the rest on my mind. But my heart, it don’t beat, it don’t beat the way it used to, and my eyes, they don’t see you no more. And my lips, they don’t kiss …"

 

He caught Louis halting in the shadow of a space heater, lost in his duende. More than a few drops squirted down the brim of his pint. It was almost vexing, knowing how he so often gnawed about hands freezing.

_How can't they when he never covers them._

Or maybe he didn't gnaw. But he did tuck them in his sleeves an awful lot, and when exposed they were pearly and tenuous.

The light slit Louis’ skin. Harry’d seen the colour before on National Geographic's Blue Planet. Teal and turquoise. Sometimes sapphire.

He could even make out the beads in his eyes marching up to fall. They were blue, too. One escaped down his cheek, impossible to trace - him being too far away. People in between. _Just people_ , Harry mused. _People, what else_? Panic tightened his gut once he caught Louis look back, but still he couldn’t tear his eyes off him. Off the tear.

Sped-up chords suggested a finale was near. Descant of chorus.

Palms roared in steady chant but deprivation of melody was all Harry could hear. A spectral numbness enveloped his hands as he, too, clapped. Chatter spread.

It was over.

 

"They'll always be my favourite band." An elbow jutted into Harry's waist, demanding ample room in the holding of a sizzling drink. "Monika." With the release of her hand off the glass, it missed Harry's hand by inches and prodded his torso instead. She was one of the girls Niall'd scrounged a fag off.

"Harry."

"Styles, right? I take it you and Niall know each other. Had no idea, though. I mean, he doesn't really sing and all. But you do. Quite nicely at that." Teeth in mid-graze of her lower lip, it was as if her mind caught up with her demenour, whispering a gentle reminder that she wasn't entoxicated enough to seduce just yet. She zipped them demurely.

"Thanks. I'll just ... 'bout to wee myself. Be right back."

"Oh, of course!" She gushed, as if it'd been some clever wisecrack.

 

It was true, though. Harry suddenly, frantically, needed a wee. Bodies veiled with a dingy sort of haze as he purchased through the density; a catchpenny blue signage down the hall a foul sort of beacon.

“Oh!” He yanked stock-still, eyes circular. “Toilet?”

“Like … whether that’s my real name? Or where to find such an object?”

“Sorry, I … The object. Just need a wee.”

“Oh, don’t apologize, superstar.” The light's gaudy glare swept shadows at the crinkles of his raven work shirt. “You had me at ‘toilet’.”

“Hah.” A quirk willed itself up Harry's lips, wishing he’d wangle a cunning comeback to boot, just his once.

“Right behind you.”

“What? Who?”

“Harry.” His pinching palms clomped onto his shoulders, willing him around. “Toilets. Right behind you. Now right in front of you. See? ‘WC’ the sign says. Synonym for toilet. Now, what are synonyms, you’d might ask? And rightfully so. A synonym is a word with related or similar meaning to-”

 _That’s it._ In a jolt, he seized Louis’ waist, playing his fingers up and down the sides in furious tickle.

“Truce! Truce!” Louis squawked, strangely leaning inwards. “I surrender,” he laughed by his lobe. "And hi, by the way. I don't remember saying hi tonight."

The toilet doors opened. Louis got released from Harry's grip in an instant, stupefied and stalled to the view of Harry's legs racing expeditiously through a swarm of blokes.

 

“Louis!” _Shit._ “Louis, been looking all everywhere on you! Bar is mess!” Manager Juan flamed by the dishwasher. Steam repelled off his face and up the bar rack.

 

Positioning at the cocktail bar, rightwards of the entrance, Louis found himself in the vile end of drunks and spills and bare all fishnet tops. He served up a dozen Jägermeister shots and let his eyes rove over the people on the tables outside. He had no idea a cover band could draw in such a mass. And it was calming how there were no pianos. The desolate hunch in his stomach had almost dispersed; he needed to be careful with tangents and wistful reminders alike.

"Cut loose, L!" Niall appeared at his side in mid-shut of the dishwasher.

"Niall? What're you do-"

"And fetch us the vodka!"

There's something alarming about drunk Irish folk, Louis thought and did a quick inspection of his surroundings. Charles and Ian were wowing the crowds with mad cocktail throws. Juan scraped remnants of a broken tip jar in ruddy-faced fury.

In a covert swoosh, Louis swiped a Koskenkorva and got to dance with Niall and a horde of people.

 

"Ni's treat." Ed shrugged at Harry's moot expression. Half a glass of chartreuse liquid billowed before him, animate in the reflection off the terrace doors. "Had to test if for you 'course. Don't worry, refill all around."

Harry took it as a shot. It even was green-tasting, if that was possible. And why wouldn't it be possible? It tasted of roses and cinnamon, sprinkled in shiny specks of glitter. Calypso. On the rocks. Rum had the tendency to bring out tropical reveries of places he’d never been. Like Indonesia and Necker Island. Also, street markets in Taipei and midnight in Koh Tao. He hadn’t travelled for ages lest for work. Never hit an outdoor cinema. Nicked a bathrobe just for kicks.

"Where you keep taking off to anyway?"

"Toilets," he said, squinting at how the venue'd grown darker.

 

Three (full) glasses of green later, Niall and Harry'd set dates to visit the Germans in underground clubs of Berlin in definite promise of top-notch, German crafted weed. And the safest lays in red light district, Stuttgarter Platz possessing the undefeated position.

Armin Van Buuren beats burst through their plotting. At some point, it'd gotten sectioned up. Guitar on the deck, techno inside, Aretha crooning by the bar.

"Günther?" shrieked through the bundle of melodies. Louis hurled from somewhere in the crowds, lobbing himself at the redhead German Harry had spoken to the least. He was mousy and timid-looking, but morphed into a pudding of affection in Louis' hold.

Louis ruffled his hair and kissed his cheek -  _okay_ \- before rolling off him; the height difference being substantial. "Annual inventory, aren't ya? And there's your lads, too," he shashayed for the rest. "Can't believe you're all back." 

"Yes, don't leave us hanging!" Frank spoke in thick, German accent. "Just because you and Günther got something special going on behind the curtains!"

"What's the green thing called?" Harry asked Ed, unintentionally stilling the entire conversation.

"Oh, the ... Yeah, let's go for the bar, I think. I can't remember what it was called. All I know is Ni managed to score free refills."

"Bloody sods, we've got 'nough right here!" Niall swung for Louis' pocket. "Look! All mini and cute and everything!" He shoved the Koskenkorva up Harry's face.

"Naughty employee." Günther reproached Louis with a glaze to his eyes.

Harry uncorked it for three solid gulps.

"I blame your presence, Irish." Ed offered a squinted look at Niall, nudging at Harry's intake.

"Fills me with pride, is what it does!"

 

In a line of haphazard events the following minutes, a few of them filtered out for fresh air on the terrace.

The brawling from inside seemed to have tripled - catching on to what Ed, Niall, Monika (who had yet to stop ogling and pursuing him) and anyone else were saying, was a vain and muffled attempt so Harry just let the degrees and his drink tinkle his cheeks for a precious moment.

Koskenkorva paired immaculately with lush, crimson grapes, a dice of lemon and the constant jingle of hexagon shaped ice cubes. Aloofly, he held it up to his ears, capturing the drink's own song.

"Gosh, what are you doing?" A girl by Monika's side giggled.

Niall sprung to her side, explaining with poker-faced sobriety how Harry's having an artistic moment which needn't be ruined by anything or anyone. "Revelations." He mumbled with stealth.

"Oh!" She whispered. "Like a prophecy!"

Harry couldn't hold back a laugh at that. Neither managed Monika; rolling eyes at each other.

"Are we all like that?" She asked.

"No. Not really."

"Good. Sorry anyway."

"No, it's OK. You're alright."

"Good, good ... Anyway, Harry, I just ... After the hiatus, you know? Last year? Honestly, we were all so worried. The fans, I mean. We hope you're ... You know, after that incident in May ... It was just a gimmick of sorts, wasn't it? The tweet? You took it off in seconds, though, so. Maybe it wasn't even you? One from your team maybe, having a laugh? A sick one at that." She huffed, more to herself than him. "It's not a laughing matter, wanting to-"

"I was thinking bubbles." Harry said resolutely.

"Bubbles?"

"Champagne. That's nice. Everyone likes bubbles."

"Amen to bubbly bubbles!" Niall dashed in for the bar, not catching on to Harry offering the pay.

He scrambled victoriously for the only little nook of free space by the counter, heaving his upper body over it and winking at the bartenders. All of them. A loud boom let his attention drift westward; Louis'd walloped his thigh against a corner second time in a row. Same corner.

Louis had it drench him in pain for the smallest of moments.

“Has someone taken the pain you feel, a love too real?” he bellowed bravely through the ache to a pack in the corner, feeling most creative for making up lyrics rather than following set ones.

 _Ah, Foo Fighters._ He'd summoned all his teenage angst in Best Of You a few years back.

A few of clapped in beat, and to Louis' surprise – a rich voice roared somewhere from the deck, “A love, a dark, a place.”

“Is someone getting the best?”

“My best, my best, my best,”

“Of you!”

“Louis, did you take the best, the best, the best …”

“The best of you?” The crowd joined.

Harry hopped round his ambit, faltering. “Now someone’s taken the love I feel, all that’s been real,”

“Stripped me off myself … and someone’s taken the best, the best, the best …”

“The best of you.”

Harry giggled. None of the crowd seemed to notice, or be bothered, of who he was. Candles disappeared and reappeared in their vision, round and round in kaleidoscope. “It’s OK!” Louis assured. Almost bumping shoulders. Almost being close. “We’re lyrics!”

“How can a person be lyrics?”

“So hot in here, though!” Louis warbled on, fanning his shirt for a rush of air. A light sweat glossed his forehead. Harry looked at it. At him. “Hot here?” Louis repeated as a response lingered, then seemed to forget about it and shut his eyes in a haze. “’s getting hot in here …”

“… So take off all your clothes.”

“I am getting so hot, I’m gonna take my clothes of.” He swayed his waist coyly to the beat of a song not playing. Harry’s lips motioned. “What?” Louis inched closer.

There was a beat of concentration, then an overt spelling of each word. It was almost too explicit. Too bare.

“Right! ‘Course."

 

"I can’t remember people being this happy in wintertime before." Harry puffed as they wandered out the main entrance in a cloud of fresh air and nicotine. Louis assumed it an ironic, if not delicious and rousing combination.

 _Clack-clack-clack,_ went the hurried clubgoers sharing their ground, expediting through their bubble of Camel.

“I can’t remember it fucking ever being so cold.”

“Oh, you,” Harry clutched a window's ledge for balance. “Mr. Sun.”

Louis arms was wrapped around himself. Out his nostrils teetered thick, pithy breaths. Harry watched it vaporize before the lanterns and the ironed latch of the door. The copper glow of the window glass. Inside, people twirled in generous circles, their laughter amped to incessant guffaws through the panes.

He quaked to the shock of Louis’ index pad trailing a tear off his cheek. As if for safekeep, he curled his fingers into his palms, entrapping Harry’s droplet.

_But I’m not sad?_

“Your cheeks are ice.” Louis said flatly, goading Harry indoors with a firm press to his tailbone.

Discarding their cigarettes against the bricks by the door, they were greeted with the singalong belt from a sloshed Ed and Niall huddled together in the lowered hallway, looking like giants compared. A strained violin backed up the ditty of two women’s voices from the jukebox as people had taken it upon themselves to improvise fervid line dancing. The reverberation of their clapping hands stirred the wooden walls. It reminded Harry of a barn.

Which … Rum. He should get more rum.

She'd been so kind, the green-drink serving bartender, and Harry eyed her with a practiced rove. It surprised him how it felt so ... innate and natural. Like a bygone habit set in its tracks. Womanizer Harry Styles. She must've gone with the script, smirking excessively and siding her torso up close to the counter. "What can I get you?"

"I don't ... Not sure yet. I'm ... I don't know." Oddly apprehensive of the way his curls plastered at his nape, he shook it loose.

A stream of people flocked out to the deck beside him, iPhones out.

Ed stood in a shaft of lights, all emerald flannel and ginger hair, vivacous in front of the woods.

The guitar – presumedly snagged from where the band had placed it in the murky corner with the Norwegian spruce – was rough on the chords, unchanged from the band's set. It seared through Harry’s head. A whirlwind of bronze and starlight came to his mind’s eye like a secret passage of the universe, while reality was Louis’ tattered jumper, thrown atop his shirt.

Louis’ snug jeans.

Louis’ young grin. Young because of the edges and the teeth.

Harry’d learned that song, Forever Young, on piano. Placed with his neighbour’s uncle for the weekend, it had been hours of nitpicking over the fracas being Harry’s gangly fingers.

“Do you really want to live forever,” he’d hummed baritone as Harry slid past correct keys and exhausted the sour ones.

He’d had a bird, too, Harry recalled. Locked in a red, stately cage by the garden-facing window. It was white with a black blot on the nape. Watching it span out its wings was a magnificent sight, but it never lasted long, and never fully unfolded.

"My turn for a wee. Join me upstairs?" Louis was by his side.

"Yeah." Harry escorted Louis' already moving frame, ideas of a drink chucked to the back of his memory.

 

Louis flung up a brittle pull-down ladder tucked behind the bar. A breach on any general HSE template, Harry deduced, sensing the pins give a little for each step he took of the vertical climb. The gloaming impression left by last time's visit diffused the instant they hoisted up the scuttle.

A coil of cords piled to the left. An iPod played a Stitches SeeB remix in the corner. An emerald sofa who most definitely hadn't been there last time, cramped with people. A woman sat on a man's lap, his steady hands glommed to her thigh. Stroking.

Or ... Had the sofa been there before? That time Louis got out of the shower, hadn't something been in the way? Hadn't Harry only been able to make out his upper body as he made them tea in the kitchen? His hips? Pelvis?

Next to the sofa stood the smallest of console tables, holding seven-something beers and a briary plant. People stood, sat and positioned in all areas imaginable - which wasn't all that many, yet seemed to accommodate everyone comfortably.

He double-blinked for clarity, pupils dilating and fragmentalizing the vision.

Louis stood by the sink. An opaline bottle was in the grip of his left hand, brows bowed in a _want some?_

Harry filed over, accepting. It was white wine, and tasted purely of young drunk. Apple and acidity. House parties in Holmes Chapel. Of summers one were 16, oversexed and budding (13 in Harry’s case. And very much horny for girls. Sometimes boys. And inappropriately older men).

The radio on Louis' worktop played another song entirely. It was ... Yeah, it could actually be ... Completely perfect.

Not perfect in the sense of being authentically hipster or perfectly autotuned or practiced for years or written spontaneously and bewitchingly within the scope of half a day. But perfect in the way it just ... sounded. Perfect in the way of having been written in an ordinary kitchen nook somewhere, or in a mediocre living room, or in any recording studio anywhere in the world. Not a lone, mournful den or a nostalgic cot falling tenderly apart just before success arrived the doorstep and rode you off into wisterias and manors.

It had been long since he'd be able to relax to this extent to a song. Long since he'd had this particular feeling. Had it happened in Sydney, perhaps ... Down by the wharf at 2:14 AM. His first kiss.

Had the feeling ever occurred in England, though? In London? In his career? His home? Quite the contrary. The most annoying tune he'd heard to date was the one at Beck's that evening he nearly froze into an irked-faced ice sculpture. And that time he went jogging only to find a persons phone chucked to the snow. His iPod had gone ballistic and replayed in skips and hops for the whole run. In fact, melodies had never been as desultory and slipshod as of December 2015, like the music industry was trying to inform him that he wasn't meant for daydreaming anymore.

“What's that song?” He kept gawping for something not in the glass. _Oops._ Completely empty. And naked. An empty, naked glass growing cold.

“Hollow & Akimbo?”

“I’ll never remember that.” He gushed, growing fast amused to how this exact scenario had never previously happened. Harry giggling. Louis quiet. It made him giggle even more.

Sensing a weighty ballast to his hand, it yielded, delicate and surprised. What might’ve been Louis’ lips quirking in the resemblance of a smile evaporated in the cast off the green lamp shade, resettling again.

“Thanks.” Harry said, diving promptly into the refill. The tang of apple was inexorable to withhold by any means. Now his hand rose, light and with ease, and beckoning, he found Louis' fingers daubing chilly, concaved strokes to his skin.

**_hollow &akimbo singularity_.**

“Now you’ll never forget.” He capped the royal blue marker.

Harry’s eyes fastened to analyse the intricate whorls on his upturned hand, as every cell of his flesh registered Louis’ eyes on them. Feet to thigh, hand to hand, brow to lips. And now the letters bled into his wrist, pooling to a thick, singular smudge.

"Yeah." He crowed. A surety swell at the basis of his voice because now he’d always remember. "Plurality."

Louis laughed. _Finally._ “Admiring the view?”

 _View?_ Harry puzzled, realising where his gaze had travelled. They stepped wordlessly onto the deck. “Nothing like yours, though,” Louis continued.

A cityscape from afar opened up, though closest were woodland and fulgurating lampposts. The dense brume hovering it all was a sieve to the stars as they poured into view, millions of light years away. Music carried up directly from the terrace beneath, with the twinkling dance of dozens of brimming drinks.

“No. This is better. We’re right beneath it.”

“The moon?”

“Yeah, the moon, everything.”

“Well, I think you, the moon, and Neptune got it right then.”

“I’m not quite right, I think.” Harry said, missing the song reference.

“I can vouch for that.”

"Ha-ha."

“Too bad Ed and Ni’s not up here.” Louis sunk his elbows against the railing, peeking down at the top of Ed's head and his guitar swaying in matching motions.

“Yeah, you were all over them today.” Harry slurped the remains of the wine bottle, liquid spilling down his lips.

“Aw, are you going for sarcasm again? Noble how you don’t give it up.”

Harry shot rod-straight, eyes wide, “ _What_ an incredible, marvellous row of shops! I cannot believe, hand on my heart, this line of shops. The way they _stand,_ ” he swat haphazard squares in the air, “the way they _shine_ , the way I want to _be_ these shops …”

“Ha-ha. I didn't do it like that.”

“You didn't do it like that?”

Louis shook his head. He might be speechless but in no way aghast. “You're quite right. ’s actually good,” he nudged at his glass, retracing the gist of their aroma colloquy. It might've been unspoken, but he knew for sure that Harry enjoyed the taste. And it'd be something else to talk about besides the market.

Harry only smiled. “New Zealand, says the label.” He cocked an eye, trying to spot Wellington on the label's pinprick topographical.

“Oceania. I’d love to go.”

“Mm. For the women?”

“Not everything’s about the women, you minx. I’d go for everyone. Tons of nice people across the globe.”

“There are lots of beautiful people. Boys and girls.”

 _Such a smooth flavour, honestly_. “Boys and girls.”

“Have you ever been with a man.” Harry puckered his lips, half-sputtering. The dregs left a sour vex in his throat.

“I’ve only kissed a guy once. In a backyard at a party when I was 16.”

A bang interrupted from downstairs. Presumably Niall striking up a dance with the Norwegian spruce, spinning too fast for it to draggle after. "It doesn't sting!" They heard his voice roar through Wham's Last Christmas.

“It was a weekend in March,” Louis continued, unperturbed. “He was like a badboy of sorts. I remember him cooking up his own alcohol, once even having to get pumped. And by chance we were at the same party, and yeah. He just lit a cigarette and gave one to me. I said it'd be a bit embarrassing if I coughed because I’d never smoked before but he said, that’s OK, he wouldn’t laugh. I did cough, though. Then he leaned in and kissed me. Out of nowhere.”

“Out of nowhere.”

“Mhm.”

“Sure you hadn’t led him on … Wiggled your bum or something …”

“No! I–Well, I don’t think so …”

“Just joking." Harry snickered. "Guess he couldn’t resist your charm, then.”

“Harry, how many times must this be said. Neither PR-relationships nor sarcasm suits you.”

“Hah, so you do get it’s PR, those girlfriends, do you?”

“Love is easy.” Louis' eyes shone blithely into the night air. “And none of that looked light.”

Ducking their chins, they found the tip of Ed's guitar arcing more and more fervent. I See Fire entwined with Louis’ radio shaky signals from inside, where _I can’t force it and I wish I could_ , lulled from his kitchen. _Wish I told you like I tell you now …_ _  
_

“Didn’t really want to be here.” Harry spoke out above the din. One of his locks dipped into his collarbone. Auburn in the lights. 

It cut.

_I can’t force it, can’t force it, I can’t force it, can’t force it, oh no …_

A thrill seized Louis’ heart – but it wasn’t joyous. It wasn’t something with a flare to it. When things of insurmountable character happen, like loss of any permanent kind, both the heart and soul usually hurt. The worst toll, though, is taken on the eyes, leaving a near to physical, fixed dent after a loss. It's usually spotted in the iris. A splinter in constant bloom. So that’s how Louis saw it. That’s how he knew.

“I don’t regret, though.”

“One usually doesn’t regret a musical night of this sort.” Louis tried.

Harry turned to him. Louis hadn't taken notice of how they sided shoulder to shoulder against the paling. With face smiling, it looked like Harry had burst from the inside out. Lips winter-chapped and hair a lost cause; everything a mess. Hazel eyes had gone granite, and it stung Louis something awful how no one else noticed how so little remained of him.

“Fucking boring here, Harry. Lets bugger off to the wonderous outdoors of the Heath. It'll just be us and the pompous snobs who reside there. Not that I'd ever care to know any of them. Please don't tell me you would, either. _Ugh!_ ”

“Now?”

Harry's eyes glimmered, coming alive in a fledgling sort of fashion before him. Yes, they had to go out. Right now. “Yes. Right now. Chop, chop."

Louis kept an eye on him as he downed the ladder, inspecting the stalwart grip was as he bucked down. “Don’t trip.”

“I’m not as drunk as you,” Harry retorted. “I think you need more aid down the stairs than me.”

“Moi? Off the trolley?”

“Drinking at work. Tsk, tsk.”

Thankful, Harry felt his feet reach solid ground, and darted for the table they'd sat at, unearthing his jacket from underneath a pile of topcoats. Miraculously, his hand latched on to his baby blue beanie, shrouded in the clump. Louis' gear was behind the bar, and as he buried his head in a bobble hat, he headed for the entrance while texting someone on his phone.

“… said they’ll head to Flask later.” He shoved it down a pocket in his jacket and shot a last cursory glance after Niall and the others. "One of Ni's entourage texted me."

The air outside was harsh - even harsher even then up at the deck. Perhaps it was a bad idea; the deserted streets towards the Heath probably polar by now.

"Why?"

"Well, ain't too shabby that ale house. Nice place to end a night."

"No, like ... You just got her number? Where was she, behind the bar rack?" He gurgled a wrangled sound. It was meant to be a laugh. And a joke, none the least.

Louis blushed pink against the cold, slapping back the cobalt door and taking brisk steps onwards. "She's got Niall's phone. He's probably off starting a boyband with the Germans by now. Poor girl." He laughed. It was a real one, Harry envied.

"Hm. Is it cold, you think?"

"Ehm. Yeah." He made an aborted movement of, _painfully_ _obvious?_

“I just don’t get why I'm so hot.” Harry brooded in wobbly steps up the hillock.

“There’s heaps of snow by your place. I suggest we sprinkle your face with it for cooling?”

“Do you think we’ve been spiked?"

"Intrigue!" Louis smirked. Mischief played his lips. "But who would spike us, you suggest? No creepy boors from what I could gather."

"No …” Harry cranked to a halt, the wheels of his drunken mind churning enough for his feet having to stand absolutely still. “You! You spiked us!”

“Harry, why would I ever spike the both of us? Think harder.”

“Me! You’ve spiked _me_!”

Louis swayed in half a circle round a lamppost, throat exposed in a cackle. Truly, the easiest, most delightful of feats, was fooling Harry.

He heard the laughter bubble up the pit of Harry's gorge - like the first hollow chimes of a church bell before it warms and casts across town. “Louis,” he giggled in more and more savage outbursts, mouth and body unsure of how to express it.

But it was rhythmic, Louis picked up. Soulful sounds. Harry's index aimed accusingly at his chin, enthralled with the apparent revelation.

"Now, don't make any rush movements, Hazza. We both know I'm as innocent as can be." Then _flop_. He flied off with his beanie, scurrying cross the beetling lumps of frost.

Harry spurted after, up and down and around. Louis skid down them all; his guffaws casting echoes through the chase. “Louis!” Harry stooped by a crossroad to let his breath balloon his chest. He couldn’t hold back the glee, and scrooched down in laughter, alone on the curb. Blood and wine drilled the nooks of his head. All else was quiet, he realised. The cackles, too.

Ahead splayed a labyrinthine array of primeval cobblestone, masked in chunky mist. The pavement, the austere brick walls … everything looked the same.

Trying with all his might; again and again he ran lost.

A plot of viridian tinted gras came to view in what apparead to be a centre. A spire-like shape shot up on the knoll. Forged-iron fencing closed it off; its finials the shape of erect arrows. _Astronomy Tower_ , a tin sign said. _YOU ARE NOW ON THE HIGHEST ALTITUDE OF NORTHERN LONDON_ , exclaimed below. 

A puff of air echoed out of his mouth only to be digested by the smaze some inches up.

On occation, they called out each other’s name to centre back and meet but the fog had thickened, and Harry knew little of celestial navigation. He could make out the brightest stars, but the lodestar stood smack in the middle of the sky no matter the direction he spun. Besides, Louis would cry out from one place, then foxily vanish onto the next.

If only his drunken self had come across this sooner; it was to be 5 years old, on joint adventures with a partner in crime where truly nothing could go wrong. It could be the solution to everything. To maybe every world issue. He let his palm rest against the Cornish hedging of a shut down post office, teeming with frost. There had to be some escape route around here – this was the final chink he could find.

He shut his eyes to the blackened sky. “Where are you.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as his neck tilted in defeat. It came out as a hollow rasp. Laughter brewed at the centre of his chest, willing up and out where it could be heard.

From across the road glowed the beacon of a lamppost. A coral honeysuckle climbed its pole. Louis’s shadow slung beneath it, hips slant against the dewy backdrop. A grin was plastered to his face.

“Found your Northern-boy.”

The Tinseltown emblem. Glazed zebra crossing and cars sounding from downtown. Object by object, it unravelled, as if the natural world lagged behind his perception. Wasn’t just as real. Sparks whizzed down his toes and outwards, and he felt like a centre in a rain shower of lightning bolts. It had been long since he could remember what time flying was. Standing was light. Breathing was easy. As if the world was not content, or open or new, but impatient. Crazy with it.

“Found you.” His voice was breathy.

Louis was still, no words coming out of his mouth. From his lips. Wasn’t it loud enough, perhaps. “Found you,” he croaked once more, but that didn’t come off decibel-rated either. What was wrong with him?

“So are you gonna sit on that asphalt all night? I know you like it hard, but …” Louis asked, now right in front of him. Harry hadn’t registered a single motion.

A person stood before him, bearing two purple bottles in his pockets. They shone violet against the street lights. The boy’s hair peppered with it all; the density, the light years. And it was lost to Harry. Everything. Logic. The direction of a second hand. What the missing links in theory of evolution were. Why there were oceans he had yet to write his journal about. How he wanted to write journals at all. How his days were opaque, little orbs, arranging him a picture he was yet to interpret.

But before he could respond, Louis arced in a loop across him, burrowing his upper half into Harry’s chest in a tangle. The tickles caused Harry seizures of panic. He _hated_ being tickled – it was the same with having his tailbones massaged. Oddly exhilarating but torturous in the end.

“So what are we gonna do now?” Louis asked as if he wasn’t just pinning Harry’s thighs into the prickles of a rosehip brush. “Now that you’ve finally found me?”

He rose, educing a surge of cold air between them. It had a side note of being guided out of a whizzing fire pit with the ease of a cloud, Harry thought, swift and almost bizarre.

_Why is it so easy?_

_Why is everything so easy?_

There was no more tobacco, was the thing. He clomped through every inch of his pockets to procure just a shred.

He had some at home, he knew. Or he could buy right there and then. At the corner shop. Or Tesco’s, open ‘til 11 PM. What time was it? Was it past 11 PM? Or was it super early in the evening - had it only been a few minutes since they left Dagger's, the way time sometime halts and tricks the mind?

“Harry?”

It sounded as from miles asunder, like cotton stuffed Harry’s ears, and the inside was a vacant, terrified hole. He spotted Louis lurching down the lane, peeking over his shoulder. Hadn’t Louis just been straight in front of him, though? Harry didn’t _get_ it.

“Think ’m a bit out of it,” he disclosed once he caught up.

“Me too,” Louis smiled at the _The Heath – Rescue in the flood of 1524_ signpost.

The fog had a way of expanding before him – coning a beeline for something Harry couldn’t see. In a turmoil of collywobbles, he reached out to pluck at the band-badge ironed onto the thin jacket fabric by Louis’ chest. It felt knitted in his fingers, about to tore down to the very last string. “Too light to call it night, too dark to call it day,” he hummed.

Louis snorted affectionately, shaking his head.

“Uriah Heep?” Harry explained. “This band here right on your shirt.”

Louis uttered another laugh, but it was lower.

Reaching the water cramped of ducklings, Harry saw they had grown greatly for the mere days he’d taken notice of them, wagging after their stout momma bird. He indulged the sight in contemplation of whether he should be disappointed or awed of Louis’ laissez-faire demeanour to things poetic and true, such as lyrics off the band you’ve got displayed on your lapel. Some people don’t feel all that much, he reminded himself. Some people are content.

“Your cheeks are red.” He opted for. And maybe he could some tea and stash of cigarettes back at the house. The stars were still clear, they still had time. The pink tinge lolling far away in the sky was about to set for American waters. _Descend for us._

“Are they?” Louis tittered and they went redder. "Well, anyway. There’s a field, Hazzy Berry. That’s where I think we are.”

“A field?”

The acceleration of a Range Rover vanished down the lane. Left behind were the stillness of their champs on black ice, and a strangely timed tweet from the canopy.

Too vernal too soon.

“Somewhere strange.”

A forlorn, almost abandoned look crossed Harry’s face. “Isn't it weird how we haven't met before?”

Louis shrugged. “54 million people in England. 8 or summat in London. Fucking odd we’ve crossed boroughs, I'd say.”

“But it’s like I only remember you from the snow, you know.” Harry gabbled, mostly to the coated asphalt. He was shuffling, tactically avoiding potholes.

“Nobody knows, dear Hazza. Absolutely nobody knows what you’re on about at any time of the day.” The clap of his hand onto Harry’s back made it come off like an ace compliment. “OK, _I_ get you,” he leaned in to whisper, “but I’m the only one. Though I’ve no idea why you didn’t get any of those fancy whiskeys of yours tonight. I knew diddly squat you liked rum. Imagine how little I know of you!”

“It’s one of my vices. It must be Doncastrian, though.” Harry teased. _It was an open chair,_ vibrated in his eardrums. _We sat down in_. Pause. _The open chair_.

“You genuinely are a downright twat. And I hope you know you’re not funny. Except a little bit and sporadically.”

Strips of streetlight cast the powder snow with microscopic twinkles, each a flare of their own. They dotted the landscape like an overturned galaxy.

Louis made a show of hurtling himself off the curb and onto the white layer. He flapped angels in the snow, ears tuning in on the muted ruckus going on at the pub down the bend. A dark blot commanded the entire field of vision. Thick, grey plumes swivelled to nought before the real Milky Way. Louis also knew the moon was seafoam-blue, though couldn't see any of it. He inched out the WKD bottles he'd nicked off work. One of them had fallen off as he careened onto Harry, but the snow took the fall.

“Harry?" He waited several seconds for Harry to get our of the moon's way and beckon down beside him.

"Hm?" Harry snagged them open with a trinket in his pocket, and they took several thankful gulps, thirsty and febrile.

"Do you ever wonder where you come from?”

“No? Do you?”

“Maybe we sort of came from the same place, you know?”

Louis tilted his bottle so as to empty it - it was too sugary for his liking. As he laid down the bottle, it was stationary compared to the stars above, who whirled in a hurried time lapse. Harry nodded. It was the first time he had met someone from that place - wherever that place may be. The first time he laid in the snow with anyone at all.

“There’s something you need to hear.” Louis unfurled a cabled snarl in his pocket, sharing over the one side of an earphone cord, and then pressed play for the only song downloaded to his iPod. “It goes with this, I promise. Just see.”

Harry’s eyes set right on his, darting through like bullets of a barrage. Unintentionally leaving casualties. “It does.” Louis saw his lips form, as the only sound was the melody pulsing down his thorax. Cutting loose of the visual arrest, Louis faced the sky and closed his eyelids reflexively in protection of the snowflake cascade. In stolen peeks, he saw them spin in a corkscrew loop. A sundial at 2:14 AM, cresting a tower on the tip of his nose.

Only his lids and lips were warm enough for it to thaw, and it wet his skin there with crosscut beads.

Lithe as the press of an ice cube, it trickled down his lower lip onto a crease. Descending to the swollen lip line, it jiggled with the blood thudding beneath; of fight-or-flight and apprehension.

Finally gravitating to the centre, it dripped through to his tongue, taste buds suggesting it be of iron and red wine. Of vellum.

 

By the time they’d made it to Harry, the sky was entirely greyed out with teeming snowfall. It contoured a soft lid on the air above their heads, the sleet barely touching them. The balloon-like void invoked near to total stillness, as if the air repositioned in aftershock of the song.

Harry popped in for the kitchen soon as he’d unlocked. “I’ll just put some tea on.” 

Going by the echo of his own tentative steps and a yawn, Louis trailed the darkened, perdu staircase in aim of a soft bed. His fingers instinctively got to work on the window latch of Harry’s room; the upstairs smelled of fresh linen and Aramis, and he missed the smell of white.

He did his routine of propping up Harry’s pillows and resting down on them, arms bent beneath his head for extra vision. From this elevated view, he saw the fluffy white spew out in the dark at seemingly random. No vortex at all. He wondered if this was how it was to be in a snow globe.

The door screeched – Harry should really oil those hinges – and from a topsy-turvy, he glanced two filters puckered between his lip and a handful of tobacco in his palms. Tapping winnow off both, Harry handed one over to him as he clambered over to reach the window. They curled up each their own gingerly.

Louis stamped a sooty smudge to the outer sill and watched the smithereens carry away on a trapeze of white, bedecking the whole sky. An ambulance howled from the A502 highway. Maybe someone’s demise had come tonight.

“You don’t have to do that you know.” Harry said, eyes fastened at Louis’ lips returning to the cigarette. A thin sheet of smoke wisped out his nostrils, and did a gaseous dance before their eyes. 

“I don’t think I’m addicted. I only do it when I’m with you.” He tilted his head backwards and let more vapour out his nose. “And when I’m alone.” Chill fused in to replace it. The frame of Harry was all he could see from the angle. The jet-black eyebrows, all raider-like, assaulter-ish. All the things he wasn’t. The ball of empty space still imprisoned him. No snow globe.

Louis’ mind wandered out to the universe and back at Harry, not finding the divide. Could be a crisis not separating earth from sky … person from Mercury ... Or maybe the vodka from Dagger’s had been of a decrepit range.

Harry flicked his cigarette out.

The guitar strings playing in their heads vanished. The lyrics sung from some place else – not with them any longer.

With the stillness came awfully harsh thuds of breath. Louis could hear the scare in his own heart and how it banged away at his flesh. That inadequate, physical heart … He didn't know whether to take pity on it or commend. Focusing on it like this left him with the illusive perception of treading the thinnest of tightropes. It spawned across rooftops, sometimes rivers and highways, and no one below took notice. A show, a concert of sorts, called in the distance. The vibration of it jeopardized his balance, and for every shaken step it rung louder. _Now you're falling,_ something informed. _This is to be alive._

He blinked into the room, but to no avail.

A shadow had darkened everything. At the corner of his lips, he felt a peck.

Madcap willpower had Louis stock-still. Light sweat spanned his tailbone – may have done so for a while? Harry grazed his cheek with another kiss, only just, but it was so hot, his mouth. The warmth travelled beyond the neck.

The rustle of jeans told Louis they were both motioning, settling in between the other's thighs. He couldn't exhale at all. It was much like wearing a straightjacket. And how would it then be if Harry kissed him on the lips? How would that feel? How would he breathe through that? How does one breathe through a kiss at all?

He’d mistakenly presumed Harry to be lithe but his narrow hipbones felt close to beefy when covering him like that, and as he eased his hands up Harry’s back, he melted sack-heavy cross his entire frame.

Louis met the next kiss with a slight slit to his mouth, because that's where Harry was kissing him, at the centre of his lips. He felt overcome with the fullness and with the taste; with the air slipping docile through the motions of their lips. There was no problem breathing long as he kissed Harry this exact way, and his chest sunk infinitesmally in relief. Simultaneously, Harry reached to coil his fists into Louis’ hair and massaged through them, each tug firmer than the last. Louis yielded with it, cheek burrowed in the nook of Harry’s neck, licking his salty beads of sweat. He inched his right hip slightly leftward, immediately met with a warm and heavy barrier.

_His cock’s on my thigh._

He gave a low gasp in response. Louis’d come soon. Come in his jeans. No, he didn’t want that, too hermetic ... And too ludicrous. _I'm_ _25, not 16 …_

“No,” Harry breathed, as if in total sync. It was perturbing how rapid it felt compared to Louis’ own breath, who’d gone suddenly allay. “The water.” Air emanated off his chest like the expanding of a vacuum; a dance of spectral crib toy threads skittering the skin as Harry hauled up.

It left a sore and novel ache, set with scampering steps down a carpeted staircase.

He shut his eyes so not to notice how brutally his stomach heaved. The door sounded after what could be an hour or 15 minutes. A day, a flash. A year. _Years without you_ …

“Was just worried ‘bout fire. Leaving the stove on.”

Harry trod over to him.

“Yeah.” It wasn’t a word, but a scratch somewhere up his throat. He was trying to get it together, to see other things besides the slit of torso beneath a rumpled, cobalt shirt. There were tattoos there as well. Curved leaves in slate grey.

Harry’s fingers were cold on his skin by the belt loop, compared to the heat off their faces and chests. Gradually, he eased Louis out of his jeans for then to remove his own at a much swifter pace. The laurels sided up Louis’ left thigh, as the shadow cocooned him off from the world once more. Louis licked his lips in preparation. 

It was a softer kiss.

Louis could feel Harry’s lips _length_ , and trailed up and down in tranquil measure. Perfect lips. Perfect size. Inches inside were warmth, not wet. It was the range of heat out a bonfire where you’d huddle for warmth.

Harry’s thumbs stroke along his triceps, and though not forceful, it goaded them fully into the sheets, tongues sliding in and out of each other’s mouth in unhurried forge. It was a glimpse of a world they must’ve dreamed of, the tunnel people talk about – bridging the other side. A swift and quiet passing. Before they knew it, they’d tumbled off their shirts, nudged off socks, chucked off their briefs, when, without a word, they were there. At that someplace else no travel could ever get you.

It wasn’t a home like a house, but a return to somewhere abandoned where it was great to arrive, so damn relieving.

“I can’t stop if we start.” Harry panted, cock nudging against his balls, and the dip right beneath.

And Louis got it. He knew. “I’m not that experienced," he explained suddenly, as a realistic and fretful side note of what was about to happen.

"Fishing for compliments again?" Harry eased off for something beneath his bed. "You don't need to do that," he said, procuring forth a packet of condoms and lube. He slid it on in an angle Louis couldn't see, and uncapped the bottle before squirting some on his cock. The whole process was both sped up and prolonged. Louis felt absolutely absorbed by the stillness of Harry breathing, of the bare sounds his actions made. They were tones of shorn pubic hair, like tiny scratchy rubs, of disrobed skin, spooked and white in the darkness.

As if a planned event since the day they met. January 8th.

His cock shoved up against Louis' cleft, and he took on a gradual entering, stilling the head. Louis could feel it pulse and beat. It was two whole minutes of just laying still, and feeling. “This is really good, Louis,” Harry rasped, out of breath by the motion alone.

“You think?” Louis closed his shoulders in on himself. It looked polar by contrast of where he lay with legs wrapped up eagerly against Harry’s thighs. Not able to stop the want billowing through him, he pressed up against Harry’s cock for each lazy thrust, inching it deeper and deeper. He felt split apart but sated, itchy with delicious ache. In a strange way he was steadied by Harry, by his cock and its vein. The balls, the pelvis … 

"Fuck ..." He panted airlessly. "Yeah ..."

“Don’t say that now.” Harry said, deep in concentration. Louis chuckled. Was Harry aroused by a _yeah_? “This isn't funny." Harry warned with a crooked smile. "You have no idea how you feel."

He positioned on his knees to gain some, any, kind of control. Now able to watch himself disappear in and out of Louis’ pliant ass, he realised he'd probably lost it - he'd lost his mind. The tightness enraptured him entirely, spurring feverous thrusts. Nothing had a weight. The sounds coming from Louis were airy and desperate, sounding close to choking. It was too good, in a way, and Harry felt himself slacken. He collapsed over him.

“It’s today.”

Louis felt his skin lax against the damp of tears and tongue, because Harry was still kissing, still sucking his lobes and throat. Louis recoiled. The heaviness of it, the plan that had missed the boat ... it clobbered him like an iron block. “Stay,” he puled, reaching mindlessly to touch himself as Harry bit his nipples.

He felt Harry grow at that, stretch and swell deep. Louis let his eyelids drop, blissed of suddenly being pounded, though the left side of Harry's face was eerily moist. Louis would’ve stopped him if it wasn’t for the incessant fucking and his arms tucked around Louis, nearly lifting him off the mattress. _Suddenly I’m flying, I’m flying like a bird_ … chanted in his head, and a weak titter escaped him.

“... 're beautiful,” Harry croaked. A drop - or a bead perhaps - slid down Louis’ ear canal.

Louis’ began cogitating he’d come already. He couldn’t tell it apart from the moist sweat between their stomachs. And hadn’t the muscles in his midriff contracted more than once? Hadn’t it all been a spasm? It felt like being plugged to an electrical circuit, igniting and shutting each other out based on contact alone. How had it been anything else, ever? He recalled the three other people he’d had sex with; two one night stands and Hannah. Looking back on it now it felt like something alien and removed from him entirely. What was life, before?

Falling apart can’t be that bad, he reasoned in a slaphappy state; it beat happiness by miles. It was the upsurge of a stream where his feet whooshed with the currents below, trembling of what must be euphoria.

He whined as he tried catching his breath. A heartbeat to his right, a heartbeat on his left ... It was slick everywhere, especially down their tummies and between Louis’ thighs where something warm and ropy slid down.

They must’ve come.

They’d come and Louis hadn’t _felt_ it.

Harry raised, and for some inches Louis raised with him, befuddled from the distance. _How gone am I?_ “Harry, you’re shaking too.” His treble voice embarrassed him. There were no other sounds to drown it. The treetops and the power lines stood alarmingly silent. The window was fully up and it was dead cold. “I'll make us the tea,” Harry soothed.

A nod. A kiss.

The kitchen tiles were unforgiving against Harry's soles. Turning on the tap, he watched it stream into the casserole he placed in the sink. Tears pooled by his elbows as he sagged against the table top, hands fisting through his hair. He straightened out and blinked it away. He eased two Earl Grey’s in the mugs and walked up a step at a time, squinting each time a boiling hot drop peppered his feet.

He nudged the door open with his left big toe, and froze.

Louis lay wiggling with tummy down on the sheets, heels coquet in the air. Naked. Taut. Like it paraded about in a show, in some themed home porn movie, chariot await, teasing Harry, luring Harry. But blinking twice he saw it was simply laid out for him, still and attainable. No red ribbons, no skimpy underwear – just Louis’ ass …

_Louis’ ass._

In a voluptuous roll, Louis turned over on his back. He noted Harry’s eyes were more gone than usual, like a daydream was happening in vivid motion right before him, and he had tumbled into its dimension. Louis tucked a bit of blanket over himself, decorous. “Just had to. You remember?”

“I remember.” Harry handed over his mug and curved back down on bed. It reminded Louis of a The Fisherman and the Siren replica - a portrait he'd seen at the Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude exhibiton in the Royal Museums Greenwhich. “So. Truthfully. What do you like about me.”

“Hm. You are dark and I am lonely?”

“Sounds depressive.”

Louis locked eyes with him, grin comely. “We are.” He was curious of whether his eyes had changed colour again or if he’d only imagined it. Imagined everything. On own accord, his fingers inched rightwards at Harry’s. “But I don’t mind. I really don’t mind.”

“I really, really don’t mind either.”

Louis' chest waved in delicate puffs, watching Harry set aside the tea for just a little bit, and it was familiar once they got to it. Warm and sweet and altered. Snogging, smiling ... It felt like something you had to be one-in-a-million to just to reach the vicinity of it, and there it was; you and that someone else who’d won, who’d descented through the storms and shifts of a billion years old earth … there you fucking were, armoured, sweaty, frail and emboldened.

Absurd.

Louis hummed to his ear. “Too scared I could not think, my eyes could scarcely see. My heart was racing, my legs were shaking, they would not carry me.” He grinned, delighted.

“Thought you didn’t listen to that stuff,” Harry moved to bring back their mugs from the sill, recognizing the song from Uriah Heep.

“I do.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Yes,” Louis giggled sweetly.

_Like the whiskey. Like the flavours._

“Do I smell white now?” Harry asked.

“Tonight you smell like showered skin.”

“Maybe it’s from the snow.”

“Didn’t snow today.”

“Well, I didn’t shower today either.”

They erupted in a chuckle. Louis’ midriff hitched in a shiver stubborn enough to rustle up the sheets, but it wasn’t from laughs, and it wasn’t from chill.

“Oh, no, are you cold.” Harry eased him in beneath the shield of his arm, grasping onto a blanket to wrap it around him.

Louis pretended it was sweet, when it almost stabbed it worse, a side note of bleeding all over, of him becoming so stupefied with it that nothing hurt. He shut his eyes. “I just ... It's so ridiculous but it's been ... Like, before you, and a bit after you ... It's been really difficult. It's been, like I haven't known what to do. I care about you." Louis ducked his head, shy and unsure of why he was saying the things he were. "I really want you here."

"I want to be here, too."

A tightness clammed onto Louis' throat and he chose to not dwell into Harry's words. _Today._ He knew, now, and touching the subject too much too soon would break him. He was afraid to utter another sound, mind blank on what letter to begin with next.

"I want to read what you write," came clangorous from beside him. It felt pivotal. 

"It's not ... It's not that great. I don't think you'd want to read that."

"That's not fully up for you to decide. What if I love it?"

"What if I’m no good?”

“What if you’re amazing?”

“Please,” he huffed in designation, “no one knows that, Harry. I actually need to be good. I’m so scared I’m not that good.” Tears marched before his lashes, set to either fall or re-enter. Whatever happened to unused tears, Louis pondered ... Inside the body; where did they go? “Just made myself so weak, is all.” He hunched in on himself, slouching his shoulders in reaction to how he felt. “Like I haven’t dared. But I don’t know what I haven’t dared. I just know I haven’t been in my own life, you know? Like I haven't done any use.”

“There’s no weakness in this.” Harry stroke his back; Louis not quite understanding what _this_ consisted of. “That’s the thing about anything anyone wants. After a certain time of preparing and perfecting, you just have to go for it. And if you fail, you try again. Everybody fails and tries again. There’s nothing to lose here. There's no weakness. You’re not alone,” he hummed, “’m here.”

Louis twisted in a cut-off sound. It just wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true – that someone would always be right there, and in addition they were there for him. How come Harry was lying? Was he capable of that in the first place? Right there, when it was just them two? Why would he do that? What was the gain? He used the back of his hand to wend off running snot. But no more words pressed, because that’s all that had been on his chest, really. That was the fear. Turned out it didn’t contain all too many words, he puzzled.

All those stories he’d written about a boy who was lonely and finally met someone who managed to love him, was just a flood of unknown people’s voices rushed to fill page after page, chapter one, two, all the way to 18, before other stories haphazardly made their entrance. The snow had brought it out. And sometimes the rain. The mist. The middle of a movie. Middle of the morning. The coffee mugs he poured himself at 11 PM. The smell of a chimney’s bricks. He could write 24/7 (had he not been so oddly anxious of his hereditary osteoporosis).

Then in the December he’d met his actual main character, and it was startling because it was a breathing man with tattoos on tanned skin like it hadn’t been winter at all – crow feet from his cheeks to his temples, devil horned hairline … But with real life came everything else, too. There were people and scenarios he couldn’t have predicted if he tried. The beautiful man and also other beautiful people, more beautiful than Louis, whom would surely win his heart eventually. Maybe not today but after a few months, or years.

They grew apart, people would say. Yes, they termed it true love but obviously it wasn’t. Yes, Louis’ writing skills grew poor, unfortunately. But at a party in L.A., Harry’s team met a new songwriter and he and Harry got along exceptionally well. Yes, they’ve adopted. No, I’ve never seen anyone look at each other as lovingly and passionate as that. Harry really tried with Louis but ‘t was a bit frog and prince, wasn’t it? And that silly poem collection Louis published? What is this, 15th century Renaissance?

Because no one understood.

No one ever understood.

“Louis?”

Louis turned, hoping the red in his eyes didn’t give anything away but sleep deprivation. _Oh no_. Harry’s were red too. Why were they red? “Harry. Harry, why are you sad?”

“Because … uhm … this is new, I guess.” He laughed in snorts, lips quickly resettling in a frown.

“It’s new to me too.” He flicked his hand once more to swipe his nose. Gosh, how much snot did he produce?

Harry placed a tentative hand atop Louis’ chest. It spread in a starfish, and Louis felt Harry’s breath skim the edge of his shoulder. “I’m as scared as you. I want what you want.”

 _We’ve sat like this_ , Louis stated to a place in himself that felt dried out and vacant. Unexplored. No matter what happened in the future, they’d sat like this, touched like this. Time didn’t rewind, which meant he’d never lose it.

Harry’s mouth skimmed his jaw, dropping a languid kiss. “You're my lion heart, you know. Grrr.”

Meaning to laugh, Louis fell in yet a tremor from Harry’s tongue heating the goose bumps having sprung out. He caught a glance of the whirlwind outside. The vision felt momentary, like it would transfer soon. As it would did he agree on Harry’s flimsy dreams for their future.

“You promise to sing what I write?” He asked because why not, now that everything was champing at the bit and ripe.

“Mhm,” Harry hummed into a lovebite.

 _OKOKOK._ Louis shut his eyes harder.

Harry’s mouth let go, nose nudging Louis’ tragus in reply. No further epistle.

Outside were night and Messier 78, though real darkness, Louis' thoughts debated, weren’t necessarily of a distant kind.

Stars form in the coldest, most dense regions of space called molecular clouds. The void must be so strong that all collapses under it; every light element squeezed until burst. At its centre, the extreme increase in temperature causes a balance in the gravity, and forms a protostar. With high enough pressure, the collapse slows, entering the star into its main phase, like the current phase of our sun.

The larger the star, the faster they consume their hydrogen, reaching a lifespan of a few million years before detonating as supernova. The cosmic explosion is often likened to the term, 'better to burn out than to fade away'. From the blast comes elements such as calcium, titanium, iron; elements our world is build upon, the remnants of which we carry in ourselves - the collectors of faraway combustions that we are. Gas clouds compress through their shockwaves, causing new stars to appear.

And maybe that was true darkness; the end and the beginning of all things, and of any world and of every light.

_Of you and I._

 

 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've come across a talented pianist, Sunny Choi, and what do you know, she covers Chandelier as well. Here is her piano version, and what inspired the story's ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In0uxyc7CKw&ebc=ANyPxKoJkpokjF9j7X2ANzskiSHuTW5AlsPh5wGX5zEVlkp6PtZ__ef0XxWABQ2SqCLnE0_zZ9CfoTttAXRhcOlEUkiS1OyUwQ
> 
> &
> 
> Titanic version at Rose & Dagger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcbE8KCIoaM
> 
> Vance Joy's Georgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMsEoP4twIQ
> 
> The Killers cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DCscjNnTBU. It's slightly reminiscent of how I picture the pub's backyard, and what inspired this chapter's title //I caught my stride, I flew and flied  
> I know if destiny's kind, I've got the rest on my mind//
> 
> Hollow & Akimbo's Singularity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQrsnQACPW8
> 
> Harry and Louis walking in a snow that falls approx like this: https://www.instagram.com/p/BCjG2Ygs4vn/?taken-by=hevdawg (AND CHECK OUT THE ACCOUNT'S CAKES MY GOD)


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